Public notes from activescott
An ESPHome external component for monitoring and controlling GE appliances — and other appliances supporting the GEA bus — via the GEA2 or GEA3 serial bus, with native Home Assistant integration.
What was Citizens United about?
Citizens United arose in 2007 when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The Supreme Court eventually decided 5–4 that Citizens United was within its First Amendment rights to spend its money disseminating the film. But rather than opining solely on the case before it as it had been asked to do, the Court took the opportunity to entirely strike down century-old prohibitions on corporate “independent” spending — money that doesn’t go directly to a candidate or party.
The justices who decided Citizens United held that independent spending could not pose a substantial risk of corruption on the erroneous assumption that the money wouldn’t be under the control of any single candidate or party. They also assumed that existing transparency rules would require all the new spending they were permitting to be fully transparent, allowing voters to appropriately evaluate the messages targeting them.
Both assumptions have proven to be incorrect. While super PACs and other outside spenders are supposed to be separate from candidates and parties, they usually work in tandem with them — to the point where affiliated super PACs that can raise unlimited money are now integral to most major campaigns. Legal loopholes also mean that many of these groups can keep their sources of funding secret.
These trends reached new heights in the 2024 election. Billionaire-backed super PACs helped the winning presidential candidate close a substantial fundraising gap. These groups also went beyond just running supportive ads. A group funded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, took on core components of the winning campaign, including voter outreach operations. And dark money from groups that do not disclose their donors topped $1 billion, including at least $182 million that was funneled through groups closely aligned with the two major parties’ congressional leadership campaigns.
Political action committees, known as PACs, are organizations that raise and spend money for campaigns, or whose major purpose is to support or oppose political candidates or ballot initiatives. Traditional PACs are permitted to donate directly to a candidate’s official campaign, but they are also subject to contribution limits, both in terms of what they can receive from individuals and what they can give to candidates. For example, PACs are only permitted to contribute up to $5,000 per year to a candidate per election.
In the 2010 case Speechnow.org v. FEC, however, a federal appeals court ruled — applying logic from Citizens United — that outside groups could accept unlimited contributions from both individual donors and corporations as long as the groups don’t give directly to candidates. Labeled “super PACs,” these outside groups were still permitted to spend money on independently produced ads and on other communications that promote or attack specific candidates.
In other words, super PACs are not bound by spending limits on what they can collect or spend. Additionally, super PACs are required to disclose their donors, but those donors can include dark money groups, which make the original source of the donations unclear. And while super PACs are technically prohibited from working directly with candidates, weak rules that are supposed to enforce this separation have often proven ineffective.
For example, in the 2022 midterms, just 21 of the biggest donor families contributed $783 million and billionaires provided 15 percent of all federal election financing — most of which went to super PACs supporting congressional campaigns. These donors easily outspent the total given by the millions of small donors giving to House and Senate candidates that cycle.
Citizens United allowed big political spenders to exploit the growing lack of transparency in political spending. This has contributed to a surge in secret spending from outside groups in federal elections. Dark money expenditures increased from less than $5 million in 2006 to more than $1 billion in the 2024 presidential elections alone.
Over the long-term, Citizens United would have to be overturned by a constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court. In the meantime, there are policies that can combat the dominance of big money in politics and the lack of transparency.
At a minimum, it is critical to ensure that all large campaign donors are disclosed. Strong disclosure laws, like the one enacted in Washington, require groups spending significant sums on election activity to report their largest donors. Separately, lawmakers and regulators should pass stricter rules to prevent super PACs and other outside groups that can raise unlimited money from coordinating directly with candidates and parties. Existing laws also need to be fully enforced, which has been a longstanding challenge at the federal level thanks to dysfunction at the Federal Election Commission.
Further, candidates can be offered alternative means to fund their campaigns without relying on big donors and super PACs. The most effective way to do that is public campaign financing, specifically small donor matching, in which small private contributions are amplified using public funds. Fourteen states and dozens of large cities and counties have enacted some form of public financing, with other localities actively considering it. Such a system recently went into effect in New York State and candidates have widely adopted it, allowing them to raise far more in small donations from their own constituents.
Notably, overwhelming majorities of Americans across party lines have consistently expressed disapproval of Citizens United. At least 22 states and hundreds of cities have already voted to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. And national polls routinely show that reducing the influence of money in politics is a top policy priority for Americans, a finding consistent across demographics including race, age, and political party affiliation.
So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security. What's more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes--and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier--as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance--and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.
In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.
2026 UFMP Vision and Goals
Council Study Session
July 21, 2026
Anna Heckman, Environmental Program Coordinator
Board Certified Master Arborist, Certified Urban and Community Forester
A majority of Democrats opposed the legislation, citing opposition to the Iran war and concerns about a provision in the bill that would establish the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. The section also directs the Secretary of Defense to appoint an “executive agent” at the Pentagon to oversee the newly formed initiative.
GOP Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), who led an unsuccessful effort to remove Section 219 from this bill earlier this week, said this provision “tragically merges our military and supply chains with Israel’s.”
A plugin driven framework to build WYSIWYG Markdown editor.
The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize, and defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice.
We have solutions for democracy’s most pressing problems.
Voting & Elections
Americans still face many barriers to voting. Meanwhile, elections require secure systems and independent administration of the casting and counting of ballots. The Brennan Center fights for voting rights, and we advocate for plans that will safeguard the election system — and the officials who work in it — from attacks and political interference.
Money in Politics
Americans are fed up with the role of big money in political campaigns. The Brennan Center’s solution: small donor public financing to put power back in the hands of individuals.
CloudServer (formerly S3 Server) is an open-source object storage project to enable on-premises S3-based application development and data deployment choice.
Spreadsheets, forms, dashboards, python-formulas, calendars, access rules, collaboration, automations. OPEN SOURCE.
Shortly before the 1956 presidential election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a recess appointment to place Brennan on the Supreme Court. Brennan won Senate confirmation the following year.
Due to his ability to shape a wide variety of opinions and bargain for votes in many cases, he was considered to be among the Court's most influential members. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who served alongside Brennan between 1986 and 1990, called Brennan "probably the most influential Justice of the [20th] century."[4][5]
Brennan strongly believed in the Bill of Rights, arguing early on in his career that it should be applied to the states in addition to the federal government.[41] He often took positions in favor of individual rights against the state, favoring criminal defendants, minorities, the poor, and other underrepresented groups.
Furthermore, he generally shied away from the absolutist liberal positions of Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, being very amenable to compromise in order to win a majority of Justices.[42]
he believed that the deliberate taking of human life by the state, as a punishment, was inherently cruel and unusual.
In Glass, the Court chose not to hear a case that challenged the constitutionality of the use of the electric chair as a form of execution. Brennan wrote:[47]
Th[e] evidence suggests that death by electrical current is extremely violent and inflicts pain and indignities far beyond the "mere extinguishment of life". Witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." "The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands." The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool.
Brennan concluded by stating that electrocution is "nothing less than the contemporary technological equivalent of burning people at the stake."
Brennan wrote the majority opinion in Roth v. United States which set new standards for obscenity laws, allowing some prosecutions, but drastically loosening the laws overall.[48] He later reversed his position in dissent in Miller v. California arguing that obscenity laws were unconstitutional.
He is regarded as one of the most liberal justices in the history of the court.[54]
Mamdani has said New York City’s legal department is discussing the possibility of arresting Netanyahu when the prime minister is in the city to attend the United Nations General Assembly.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.
“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court. And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years,” the mayor said.
Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday, said, “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on Nov. 21, 2024, alleging he is “responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population” in Gaza, as well as “crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”
AIFoss covers open-source AI tools for people who want to run AI without handing data to a third-party API. If a tool requires a cloud account to use, it's not in scope here.
Why this site exists
Open-source AI moves faster than any publication can track, and most coverage is either a GitHub README written by the maintainer or a 10-minute YouTube install video. We do something different: structured comparisons, documented test configurations, and honest assessments of what each tool is actually good at versus what it claims.
What you'll find here
- LLM runners — Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, Tabby: feature comparisons, performance tradeoffs, when to use each.
- Image generation — ComfyUI, Automatic1111, InvokeAI, Fooocus: workflow depth, hardware requirements, upgrade paths.
- Coding assistants — Continue.dev, Cline, Aider, Tabby: setup guides, model pairings, honest productivity assessments.
- Self-hosted stacks — Open WebUI, Flowise, n8n, Langfuse: integration guides and real-world deployment patterns.
GPU benchmarks, local LLM tutorials, ComfyUI workflows, and self-hosted AI guides for the home lab crowd. Tested on the cards you can actually buy.
The Liberty Phone exists alongside our regular Librem 5; it’s the same freedom you’ve grown to trust with Purism products, it’s the same operating system (PureOS), the same software, and the same privacy protections built in; the Liberty Phone adds a highly controlled secure supply chain.
Real convergence means bringing your desktop computer with you wherever you go. When we talk about how we have invested in convergence with PureOS we start with the desktop OS and shrink it down to your pocket.
A whole mobile operating system experience, that is yours.
A free and open-source operating system for various devices, based on the Android mobile platform.
We’re making a statement by offering The Fairphone (Gen. 6) and Fairphone 5 with /e/OS pre-installed on our webshop.