According to the group, its three members were carrying a letter from its American record label explaining that the musicians were scheduled to perform a number of "promotional," nonpaid performances in the U.S., including a live performance at member station KEXP, as well as a showcase at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

After Public Battle, SXSW Apologizes And Pledges To Change Its Artist Contract
The band says that its three musicians were questioned for several hours, and "agents" (presumably U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers) denied them entry into the country. From the airport, the band says, the three were taken to a jail and held overnight before being escorted to a plane and sent back to Italy. The three say that they were treated "like criminals."

In its statement, Soviet Soviet says that the agents' refusal to permit the band's entry seems to have stemmed from the fact that the agents believed that the group needed work visas to enter the U.S., because two of the venues at which Soviet Soviet was slated to perform were going to charge audiences entry fees — even though the band says that its musicians were not going to earn any money while in the U.S.

The House Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs Committee on Wednesday advanced the resolution supporting the designation of the Bible as Arkansas' state book. The bill, which now heads to the full House, says the system of law contained in the Bible forms the basis upon which modern civilization is structured.

Whether it's Medicaid or a new program, every single person in this country should be covered 100% for chronic physical or mental illness and for any life-threatening injury.

The premiums that we are paying to insurance companies as individuals or as company coverage for these significant risks would go from the insurance companies to the IRS. Only the cost of covering what's left would continue being paid to the insurance companies.

It would not be hard to do the math. Every insurance company does this analysis already. The government does this analysis already. We all would end up paying more in taxes, but less in insurance and healthcare costs over time.

There would be no mandates. There would be no individual penalties. No tax credits. No subsidies. No offsets or deductions for buying higher end insurance. This will be single payer (yes, I know it's a dirty phrase in this country) for chronic physical or mental illness and for any life threatening injury.

Everything not covered by the above can be covered by insurance sold on the free market, managed by the states, sold across state lines, without government interference.

Presidential psychology is quickly becoming a bipartisan issue. Recently, Senator Al Franken said that he and several of his GOP colleagues shared the opinion that President Donald Trump is “not right mentally.” Shortly thereafter, 35 mental health professionals — psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers — took to the pages of the New York Times to register their own concerns that the President was demonstrating “grave emotional instability.”
These controversial armchair diagnoses are powerless on their own. But what if there was something that Senator Franken and his concerned colleagues could actually do? Constitutionally speaking, there might be.

While theoretically possible, it is highly unlikely that the Vice President and the Cabinet would unite to remove the President absent a clear incapacitation along the lines President Woodrow Wilson experienced after a stroke. Even if there was a bipartisan consensus that he was unfit to serve, the President would have broad authority to remove his Cabinet before it could take any action.

But there is another provision in the Amendment that has received much less popular attention — one that could allow Congress to play a role in removing the President. And no, it isn’t impeachment. Instead, a little-known provision in Section 4 empowers Congress to form its own body to evaluate the President’s fitness for office, eliminating the need for the Cabinet’s involvement in the process (emphasis ours):

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

But what constitutional constraints are put on this power? Remarkably, there aren’t any. The framers of the 25th Amendment left the provision purposely vague, allowing Congress flexibility to decide on its specifics at a later date. It should come as no surprise to those who bemoan Congress’s frequent inactivity to find out that in the 50 years since the Amendment passed, it has never made such a decision.

ELKHART — Chris Bontrager said he was “upset and shocked” when the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles denied a personalized plate request he had submitted in early January. The Goshen resident wanted a plate that read “Atheist”, but the BMV turned down the request in a letter that does not cite the specific reasoning for the denial. Bontrager says he thinks the denial was religiously motivated and that he didn’t think there would be an issue when he asked for the personalized plate. “The BMV’s online tool said that it fit the criteria to be on a plate and I paid for it,” he said. “So I was a little surprised when I got the denial letter.”

The state’s ability to deny any application that comes through was reinforced in a 2013 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana on behalf of a motorist who wanted to purchase a plate that read “OINK”. The state temporarily suspended its program due to the lawsuit, before starting it up again in March of 2016. Both the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have sided with the state’s ability to decide whether a message on a personalized plate will be approved or denied, because it is considered “government speech”. Something the BMV reaffirmed in a statement to The Elkhart Truth.

“The Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that a state-issued license plate message constitutes government speech. As such, the BMV has broad discretion to approve or deny a given personlized plate message for any reason,” said the BMV. There is an appeal process that Bontrager can take, but he admits that the broad discretion the BMV has in this matter makes an appeal difficult to win.

Bontrager said that he has spoken with ACLU lawyers about suing the state to have his license plate approved and Bontrager said he was told by the ACLU that he might have a case based on the state’s Establishment Clause, which provides that if the government allows one religious statement, it must allow all religions to have the same benefit.

The white guy wants to preserve the black roots of jazz while the black guy is the sellout? This could be a deliberate ironic twist, but if it is, it's a distasteful one for African-Americans. One legitimate complaint that marginalized people (women, people of color, Muslims, the LGBT community, etc.) have had about Hollywood in the past is that when they were portrayed, it was done in a negative way. The ditzy blonde, the Muslim terrorist, the gay predator are all familiar stereotypes from years of TV and movies. So much has been done in recent years to overcome those debasing images, but we still have to be careful. It's not that a black man can't be the sellout or the drug dealer, it's just that they shouldn't be if they're the only prominent black character in the story. Whether it's intentional or unintentional, that sends a bigoted message rippling through our society.

Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in the Tenth Circuit decision in Hobby Lobby v. Sibelius, stressing the idea that the plaintiffs themselves were the sole arbiters of whether a law violated their faith, thereby dramatically extending the coverage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and expanding the opportunities for individuals to demand religious exemptions from laws.

Gorsuch has also shown a willingness to support legal privilege for religious, in particular Christian, views:

In his dissent in the case of Summum v. Pleasant Grove City, he suggested that the government should have been permitted to place a donated Ten Commandments monument in a public park without opening it to other donated monuments;

He dissented against a decision not to rehear a case requiring Utah to fund Planned Parenthood;

In a book he authored on assisted suicide, Gorsuch stated that he believed that Roe v. Wade could not have been decided as it was if the Court had defined a fetus as a person, as “no constitutional basis exists for preferring the mother’s liberty interests over the child’s life.”