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McKesson files motion to vacate Judge Griffen's temporary restraining order, dismiss case

Michael Buckner, KTHV 3:35 PM. CDT May 03, 2017

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) - After the Arkansas House of Representatives passed a resolution allowing for legislators to consider an impeachment, Judge Wendell Griffenhas responded to what he says is an effort to impeach him.

The resolution was introduced Tuesday and was passed on Wednesday changed the House rules to consider impeachments. State Senator Trent Garner (R-El Dorado) has called Griffen'sruling on the McKesson case and his subsequent appearance outside the Governor's Mansion a "mockery of our judicial process." Garner thinks the judge should be removed from his duties due to what he calls "gross misconduct."

In response, Griffenwrote a post on his personal blog on the passing of the resolution to change House rules which he alleges is in relation to him. He began his post by quoting Frederick Douglass, a famous black abolitionist. The quote reads, "There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution."

"Now, as when Douglass made that statement," Griffen said, "there appears to be a huge gap between what some politicians claim to believe about freedom and their conduct."

Throughout the blog post, Griffenasserted that his critics are attacking his First Amendment right which gives citizens the right to free speech, freedom to express their religion, and the right to peacefully assemble. He claimed Arkansas legislators and other politicians are "outraged" because he decided to express his First Amendment rights at a Good Friday prayer vigil the same day he granted a temporary restraining order on the use of one execution drug.

"The First Amendment guarantees my freedom to be a follower of Jesus, whether politicians like how I follow Jesus or not," Griffen said. "The First Amendment guarantees my freedom to assemble peaceably with other persons, whether politicians approve of what I think."

Griffen said his critics took an oath to uphold and support the United States Constitution and that their actions should emulate the oath they took.

"We have no right to use our offices to punish or threaten people for exercising their right to disagree with us," Griffen said.

The Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission are currently investigating Griffen's conduct from April 14 to see if violated the Code of Judicial Conduct.

Griffen then filed his own ethic complaint against Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Arkansas Supreme Court. He said neither the court nor Rutledge gave him an opportunity to respond to the effort to disqualify him. The commission will look into that complaint at the same time as they look into Griffen's conduct.

House Speaker Jeremy Gilliam during the passing of the resolution said there aren't any plans to impeach Griffen. During the debate, several legislators disagreed strongly with the change. State Representative Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) said the commission investigating Griffen already has the authority to discipline him.

To read Griffen's full blog post, click here.

2017 KTHV-TV

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Sen. Garner calls for impeachment of Judge Griffen, House votes to amend rules

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See the original post:
Judge Griffen says critics, politicians are attacking his First Amendment rights - THV 11

There was plenty of Trump-related news for Stephen Colbert to get to on Tuesday night: the GOPs latest attempt to pass the American Health Care Act, that call with Vladimir Putin (You know things are bad when Putin is the voice of restraint), the rolling back of Michelle Obamas healthy school lunch program. But the biggest news for the Late Show host continued to be the presidents proud dismissal of the Constitutionin this case, the First Amendment.

They want to get rid of the First Amendment? Colbert asked, after playing a tape of Reince Priebus saying the administration was looking at changing national libel laws. Stop the presses! Seriously: Stop the presses. In fact, the Late Show exclusively revealed a draft of the administrations proposed change, and it was, lets say, quite Trumpian:

Read the rest here:
Stephen Colbert Previews Trump's Proposed Changes to the First Amendment - Slate Magazine (blog)

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has revealed that President Trump is considering amending or even abolishing the First Amendment over claims of fake news by the mainstream media.

Lets look at this closely: yes, some mainstream news is exaggerated to get more viewers and misinformation can slip through, but to even think about changing the First Amendment is a dangerous idea.

Trump has already been mass-tweeting about certain publications that criticize him, including the New York Times and The Washington Post, but this is beyond firing back at media coverage: this is taking away the right to free speech and the right to a free press.

The Trump cabinet is always doing interviews like this, bringing up fake news as if its a recurring issue. Most news organizations do work hard to put out quality (and factual) stories; its the criticism that Trump cant stand, and why this is even being discussed.

In answering a question about whether Trump would actually go about changing the libel laws, Priebus responded, I think its something that weve looked at. How that gets executed or whether that goes anywhere is a different story.

This is alarming, especially when the entirely of the Trump cabinet have repeated these talking points about fake news over and over again. They are trying their hardest to spread a message that the news can no longer be trusted.

Follow this link:
SHOCK: Trump Considering 1st Amendment Clampdown | HuffPost - Huffington Post

Washington

Well, she did not show up. I am talking about Ann Coulter, the svelte conservative firebrand who was invited to the University of California at Berkeley, to speak and inadvertently to show the assembled coeds how a stylish blonde dresses. But then she was disinvited. Hold on, she was, of a sudden, reinvited but only under certain university conditions. Confusion ensued. Then the speech was lost in the swelling controversy. According to Ann, I looked over my shoulder, and my allies had joined the other team. Her allies presumably were members of the Young Americas Foundation.

Honestly, I cannot imagine the stalwarts of YAF joining with the faculty of U.C. Berkeley in any joint endeavor, but maybe I am wrong. Life on campus has been changing for years. Always things get worse. Once a prof dressed in tweeds; now they dress like little boys.

One thing I know for a certitude neither Ann nor YAF should want anything to do with U.C. Berkeley. In fact, I cannot imagine any intelligent person wanting anything to do with most universities, much less wanting to lecture at one. Why would Ann Coulter want to speak there? Why would any intelligent person want to speak at almost any university in the country?

I have not spoken on a college campus in twenty years. Then the venue was Hillsdale College, a remarkable place, and my date at Hillsdale was the first time I had appeared on a college campus since since the early 1970s (when I spoke at what is called an Ivy League institution, and some fussy dean asked me before leaving campus to sign their guest book. Clandestinely I did. I wrote: Have a nice day, Richard Speck).

Aside from Hillsdale and one or two other colleges nationwide, why would any intelligent person bother? What kind of audience would I be speaking to? The intelligent, intellectually alive, free-thinking students generally agree with me and are in no need of seeing me talk. As for the protesters, the bed-wetters with their illiterate placards and their nonsensical tee shirts, their minds are too cluttered with politically correct gibberish to contemplate anything I might say. Better that they spend their time at the local Rape Awareness Seminar or a Take Back the Night workshop.

The decline began in the late 1960s. Before that college campuses were all pretty much dominated by liberals: Hubert Humphrey Democrats, Great Society enthusiasts, with a few socialists thrown in for a cosmopolitan whiff. Most of the liberals at least conveyed facts and respected those of their students who dissented from their liberal pieties. They believed in the existence of truths, their truths, but they were not so insecure in their truths as to be neurotic about them. Boy, are the profs neurotic today.

Things on campus began to change by the 1970s and 1980s. Then the students who were radicals in the 1960s began to become junior faculty, then senior faculty. Along with them came the feminists, the racialists, the lecturers on even more extreme brands of esotery. The result is that if there is an old-fashioned liberal on campus today that liberal is the campus conservative. The rest are radicals and dispensers of New Age Nonsense.

The climate on campus now is somewhat an admixture of Communist Cuba and kindergarten. One could sense it all coming by reading the radical thinkers whose books were espoused in the 1960s by the New Left students, soon to be junior faculty and now retiring senior faculty after utterly trivializing their institutions. Their sages were goofball Marxists who often ended badly, thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. For Adorno one memorable goofball moment came a few months before he expired at age 65. One moment he was holding forth on dialectical thought before nearly a thousand students in some crummy auditorium. The next he was surrounded by bare breasted maidens showering him in tulips and trying to kiss him. The prof retreated from his dais, retired to his quarters, went into a deep depression. Within months he assumed room temperature.

This mixture of the infantile and the authoritarian is all over college campuses today. Just last month at ivy-covered Wellesley a bull appeared in the student newspaper explaining that hostility may be warranted against those who are given the resources to learn yet refuse to adapt their beliefs. That sounds like what the North Vietnamese called reeducation camp. Ann, give Wellesley a wide berth.

See the original post:
Campus High Jinks and the First Amendment - American Spectator

Lincoln Caplan, Joel Simon, Nicholas Lemann, Michael Oreskes, and Emily Bell. Photo: Meritxell Roca.

The internet in its halcyon days was lauded as a open space that could promote free speech in the US and worldwide, but it is now a realm that has settled into domination by a few companies. As we enter an age in which the internet is fully integrated into our daily lives, the main channel by which we access information, a reconsideration of the values of the First Amendment is required.

This was the motivation for a symposium on May 1 at Columbia University called Disrupted: Speech and Democracy in the Digital Age. Attended by a mix of legal professionals, academics, and journalists, the message was clear: Legal thinking around the First Amendment must renew itself in the new era. The internet is deeply affecting the shape of public discourse. In turn, how can the values of freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly shape and govern the digital space?

This was the first public event hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (the Tow Center for Digital Journalism was co-sponsor). The Institutewill surely be at the center of this debate for years to come. The First Amendment Institute, now up and running after its inception last year under founding director Jameel Jaffer, will be dedicated to research, education, and litigation pursuing freedom of speech.

Law, by nature, is always catching up to technology. Leslie Kendrick, professor of law at University of Virginia, made the distinction between east coast code and west coast codeeast coast code being the codified legal precepts, and west coast code being, well, all those lines written in computer language. East coast code, she said, is always behind west coast code; west coast code moves fast and is always inventing things the law cannot anticipate.

Legal efforts on behalf of the First Amendment have traditionally focused on the right to say thingsthe right to hand out pamphlets, as Tim Wu, professor of law at Columbia and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, put it. But almost everyone on stage yesterday agreed that, with the internet, the right to say things is no longer under threat. Instead, there are a host of other threats enabled by the advent of the internet.

Now that anyone can publish freely online, one threat to free speech comes from the ability of companies or social media platforms to control who gets heard; how many readers newspapers reach; and which citizens have a voice in a cluttered online environment of bots and ads. Zeynep Tufekci, writer for the Times and professor of communications at University of North Carolina, wondered whether Twitter users leaving the platform because of harassment might be having their freedom of assembly violated. She also warned of new censorship techniques, in use now in China, which drown out anti-government speech rather than the traditional method of silencing. Teams of social media users linked to government agents pump out celebrity controversies, Tufekci said, at the same time other users are trying to raise the profile of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Such censorship techniques take advantage of the fact that all of us have limited attention. And, as Wu has written extensively on, the entire internet is built so that our attention is the currency. Facebook, in particular, makes money off of being able to keep you on their platform, clicking. And theyve become immensely good at targeting content to you. The data they have on individuals is unprecedented: no longer demographic, but individual and granular. New litigation around the First Amendment must pay attention to this market.

Another threat to freedom of the press is the breakdown of economic models. As Nicholas Lemann, formerly dean of the Journalism School at Columbia, put it, the big story in journalism now is not Trump, but the massive loss of jobs suffered in the past few years. Michael Oreskes, senior vice president and editorial director of NPR (and a CJR board member), emphasized that the greatest loss has been in local papers: Many city halls around the country are no longer covered. While the internet has been very good in making information available globally, local news has suffered because it does not have this universal appeal.

Addressing such questionsthe economic downfall of journalism, the new attention market, a new type of censorshipwill require a more imaginative view of the (quite brief) First Amendment, said Jamal Greene, professor of law at Columbia. Consider, he mused, if we passed a law limiting the number of people you could follow on Twitter to 50. In one sense, such a law would in conflict with the First Amendmentbut in other ways, such a move might promote discussion and deliberation. How we will negotiate such cases will be the work of the coming generation.

The bottom line is that Twitter and Facebook are private companies that have become our primary sites for public discourse. The function of journalismand indeed, the function of democracydepends on upholding the First Amendment to preserve the public sphere.

Watch the full event stream here.

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Legal thinking around First Amendment must evolve in digital age - Columbia Journalism Review