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Democrats on the Legislatures Joint Finance Committee sought changes Wednesday to more narrowly focus a $450 million state income tax break for businesses that received COVID-19 help from the federal government. But the Republican-controlled committee rejected all of them before sending the measure to the full assembly.

The overall bill, AB-2, primarily consisted of routine, bipartisan changes to the state tax code, mostly to bring it into line with various changes in the federal code.

Since I first got elected to the Legislature. I have argued for simplicity, to federalize our Wisconsin tax code as much as we possibly can to make things simpler, said Sen. Howard Marklein (R- Spring Green), co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee. And thats one thing that this bill does. We essentially bring our Wisconsin statutes up to date.

The most controversial element, however, was formally added to the legislation Wednesday: a measure that allows businesses with grants from the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to deduct business expenses from their income taxes, even though those expenses were paid for by the tax-free PPP money rather than from taxable income.

That amendment also is in line with federal tax law a point that some supporters noted after several lawmakers spoke in opposition to the provision.

Theres good things here, and theres things that make it easier for people in Wisconsin to do their taxes and advantages that have been set in place by the feds for your tax law, said Rep. Mark Born (R-Beaver Dam), the other committee co-chair. And were conforming to that.

Although the expense deduction is allowed on federal business taxes, because of the mid-December Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA), some analysts have questioned the hit that state revenues would take if the deduction is allowed on state income taxes as well.

Peter Barca, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR), has told legislators that allowing businesses to take the deduction on expenses that were already paid for by tax-free federal aid amounts to a double benefit.

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Democrats on the committee criticized the Republican majority for moving so quickly to add the PPP expense deduction to the otherwise routine Assembly Bill 2 without more deliberation.

There has been no public hearing since the amendment was introduced, said Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine).

Democrats offered four amendments to the legislation to narrow the focus of the tax break to businesses that they argued would be more deserving of the largesse while also reducing the revenue shortfall it would create. A fifth amendment would have waived the state income tax on grants from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to small businesses hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic. All five amendments failed on party-line votes, 4-11.

The rejected amendments would have:

Ninety percent of the businesses in Wisconsin who received a PPP loan, approximately, received less than $250,000, Neubauer said. So they would be able to claim the full deduction equivalent to their loss.

Neubauer, along with Rep. Evan Goyke (D-Milwaukee) and Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee), voted against the final bill.

Im voting no today because we could provide better, more meaningful immediate relief to small businesses in Wisconsin that need it, Goyke said.

Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville) crossed over to vote with the three Democrats.

Strong state revenues are a great reason to reduce the tax burden, Stroebel said in a statement to the Wisconsin Examiner. Allowing the recognition of expenses while ignoring the taxpayer-funded forgivable PPP loan revenue is certainly not standard accounting principles. Only PPP recipients that made money have any state tax liability. Rather than grant profitable PPP benefactors a $457 million tax write-off, I would prefer a more broad and equitable tax reduction for all Wisconsin taxpayers.

Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-West Point), the only Democrat to vote for the measure, said he did so after hearing from owners of small businesses who were disappointed by the possibility of having to pay taxes on the underlying expenses that the PPP had covered.

Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) noted that Wisconsin Democrats in Congress had supported the legislation granting the federal tax break. A sign in La Crosse that he saw after the bill passed in December offered thanks to U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, Kurtz said. The last I looked, theyre on the other side of the party, he added, and they voted to make [expenses deductible on] these PPP loans at the federal level, so I think we need to make this at the state level as well.

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Tax break on business costs covered by PPP clears committee - Wisconsin Examiner

Amid arguments in the U.S. Senate over whether the impeachment of former President Donald Trump is constitutional, and in the U.S. House over whether $1.9 trillion is enough money to borrow and distribute to select taxpayers and institutions, there have been rumblings among Democrats to make it more difficult for the Supreme Court to invalidate or permit states to gnaw away at Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

Roe is the 1973 Supreme Court opinion that essentially establishes within the privacy of the patient-physician relationship the right to choose to abort a baby in the womb.

The opinion holds that during the first trimester of pregnancy, the states have no interest in regulating abortion beyond the health of the mother. During the second trimester, the states can regulate the procedures used, but they may not ban or interfere with abortions. During the third trimester, the states may ban or permit abortions.

Roes medical cornerstone is viabilitythe ability of the baby to live outside the womb. In 1973, viability, generally, was at the beginning of the third trimester. Today, viability is closer to conception.

Hence, state regulations protecting post-viable pre-third trimester babies.

Roes legal cornerstone is the absence of personhood.

The opinion offers that because philosophers, theologians, scientists and physicians cannot agree on when personhood attaches, then neither will the justices of the Supreme Court. Thus, Roe declares that the baby in the womb is not a person.

Yet, legally, if the baby in the womb is a person, then a host of constitutional protections insulate the baby from being killed by her mother and her physician.

The Fifth Amendment prevents the federal government which gives millions a year to Planned Parenthood from impairing life, liberty and property of people without due process. The 14th Amendment prohibits the states from impairing life, liberty and property without due process, compels them to treat persons within their borders similarly what is an unlawful killing for me is an unlawful killing for theeand compels the states to guarantee privileges and immunities; foremost among which is the right to live.

I offer this brief constitutional explanation of Roe as a background to discuss what is coming our way.

Coming our way is a massive effort by pro-abortion rights forces at the state and federal levels to shore up Roe to insulate it from interference by the Supreme Court and thereby make abortions more available and, in some states, performed at taxpayer expense.

President Joseph R. Biden has stated that he wants Congress to enact a statute that will put into positive law the right of every woman to kill her unborn child at any time, irrespective of what various states have enacted to preserve the lives of unborn children.

Is the baby in the womb a person?

Biden does not want to answer that question. I dont know how conversant he is in philosophy or constitutional law, or common sense, but he wont go near this.

Last week, the Senate defeated a measure that would have protected the lives of babies whosurviveabortions. Some abortions involve the slaughter of the baby in the womb and the methodical removal of her remains.

Some involve the chemically induced expulsion of the baby from the womb, which usually kills the baby, but not always. The Senate vote was not only humanly repulsive it permitted the states to permit the mother and the abortion provider to let the surviving baby dieit violated the obligation of the government to uphold the Constitution.

Is the baby in the womb a person?

Many states are wanting here as well, as they will not answer this question. They know the constitutional obligations imposed upon them by the 14th Amendment. Yet like their federal counterparts they are on the cusp of advancing the killing of more unborn children.

In New Jersey, for example, where abortion is lawful up to the moment of birth not because of legislation but by a rule established by the Board of Medical Examiners and upheld by the courts, and where it is taxpayer-funded, also mandated by the courts proposals are making their way through the legislature to codify into law the right to take the life of an unborn child at any time at state expense, along with a prohibition on autopsies for the aborted babyso it will be unknown if the mother and her physician starved the baby to death.

Is the baby in the womb a person?

Here we are in 2021 talking about killing babies by scalpels, chemicals and starvation.

We are, and we will be for some time. Even if the Supreme Court invalidates Roe v. Wade and the states are free to go their own way New Jersey, all killing all the time; Pennsylvania, no killing at any time we still have a Constitution that imposes profound restraints upon the power of the states to permit killings, and which gives Congress the power to enforce state compliance.

Is the baby in the womb a person? Of course, she is.

The baby has human parents, and her body contains all the genomic materials to grow into human childhood and adulthood. The denial of personhood to babies in the womb is akin to the judicial denial of personhood to Blacks before the Civil War. In the very essence of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that our right to life is inalienable.

The right to live is the highest right there is.

Any society that can impair the right to live by declaring any groups to be nonpersons has rejected the self-evident concepts of right and wrong and cannot long endure.

Negating personhood is the most dangerous thing the government can do. It is a one-way slippery slope. Whose personhood will the government negate next?

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He sat on the bench from 1987 to 1995. He taught constitutional law at Seton Hall Law School for 11 years, and he returned to private practice in 1995. Judge Napolitano began television work in the same year. He is Fox News senior judicial analyst on the Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network. He is the host of Freedom Watch on the Fox Business Network. Napolitano also lectures nationally on the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, civil liberties in wartime, and human freedom. He has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. He is the author of five books on the U.S. Constitution. Read Judge Andrew P. Napolitanos Reports More Here.

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'Personhood' Still at the Heart of Abortion Wars - WBAP News/Talk

To the editor:

The Bruni project is unfortunate. The collective response is shameful.

There seems scant evidence that anyone is enthusiastic about the proposed project. The undesirable implications have been covered ad nauseam and bear no further explication.

The collective response, however, does.

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The Bruni family has worked hard for years, contributing to the town, enriching its character, and providing products that were valued.

Theyve paid taxes on the property and maintained it. It is theirs to do with as they please within the established regulations. Period.

And yet the progeny of many folks who shopped at the market and benefited from the familys hard work are now joined by ideological newcomers, all intent on violating the Constitutions Fifth Amendment by depriving the Brunis of their property rights.

Anyone who rubs their chin and opines sagely and in a grave tone about how some bylaw or regulation might be creatively interpreted to stop the project is fundamentally a collectivist an adherent of the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.

I doubt any of them were present to help Joe build the shop, run the bakery at 0-dark thirty long before most were up, pay the bills for past-date food that had to be thrown out, etc.

And Im certain that none have lobbied to reduce the property taxes in the meantime.

So heres my challenge. If you can comfortably wear the mantle of collectivist, so be it.

If, however, youre startled (maybe even horrified) to realize what destructive ideologies weve allowed to become normalized to the point that they seem reasonable to many, then heres your chance to swallow the bitter pill, agree that the project is undesirable, but support the familys right to do with their property what they wish within a reasonable interpretation of existing regulations.

The only moral alternative is the private collection of enough money to create a private entity, support ongoing maintenance and other costs, and acquire the property at a price agreeable to both entities (which, at this point, will reflect the huge sums the owner has had to put into simply exercising their rights, but perhaps offset by some discount to reflect the sigh of relief to be done being harassed and pilloried.)

Ed MarshWoods LaneIpswich

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Letter: Bruni has right to do as he pleases within the law - The Local Ne.ws

from the so-dark-we-could-only-get-everything-we-needed dept

It's been clear for some time that the FBI and DOJ's overly dramatic calls for encryption backdoors are unwarranted. Law enforcement still has plenty of options to deal with device encryption and end-to-end encrypted messaging services. Multiple reports have shown encryption is rarely an obstacle to investigations. And for all the noise the FBI has made about its supposedly huge stockpile of locked devices, it still has yet to hand over an accurate count of devices in its possession, more than two years after it discovered it had been using an inflated figure to back its "going dark" hysteria for months.

An ongoing criminal case discussed by Thomas Forbes for Fortune provides more evidence law enforcement is not only finding ways to bypass device encryption, but access contents of end-to-end encrypted messages. This isn't the indictment of Signal (a popular encrypted messaging service) it first appears to be, though. The access point was the iPhone in law enforcement's possession which, despite still being locked, was subjected to a successful forensic extraction.

In the Signal chats obtained from one of [the suspect's] phones, they discuss not just weapons trades but attempted murder too, according to documents filed by the Justice Department. Theres also some metadata in the screenshots, which indicates not only that Signal had been decrypted on the phone, but that the extraction was done in partial AFU. That latter acronym stands for after first unlock and describes an iPhone in a certain state: an iPhone that is locked but that has been unlocked once and not turned off. An iPhone in this state is more susceptible to having data inside extracted because encryption keys are stored in memory.

Seizing a phone in this vulnerable state allows investigators to obtain evidence from "locked" phones by using forensic tools like those sold by Cellebrite and Grayshift. Signal's encryption works. But that encryption doesn't matter -- not if law enforcement has access to the device. Encryption protects against message interception but even the strongest forms of encryption can't secure communications on a partially unlocked device. In this state, it's as simple as hooking up a phone to an extraction device and letting the device do the work.

It's not clear which forensic option was used, but it does show encryption isn't making phones and communications "warrant-proof." A locked device (rather than one in an "after first unlock") is going to be tougher to crack, but it's far from impossible. And if it is indeed impossible, a wealth of information can be recovered from cloud backups, unencrypted communications platforms, social media services, and any number of third parties that collect information and location data from cellphone users. In only the rarest cases will investigators have almost nothing to work with.

Even in those cases, there are options. Investigators can roll the dice on Fifth Amendment challenges and hope a court orders arrestees to unlock their devices. They can also seek consent to a search -- something that's never a one-and-done thing when law enforcement has both suspects and their devices in its possession.

This case shows multiple layers of encryption are mainly a hassle at this point. It's enough to keep people's devices secure in case of loss or theft, but it's not much of an impediment to investigators with powerful forensic tools at their disposal.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyones attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

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Filed Under: access, doj, encryption, evidence, fbi, going dark, law enforcement

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Gun Trafficking Investigation Shows The FBI Is Still Capable Of Accessing Communications On Encrypted Devices - Techdirt

SPECIAL TO DEVILS LAKE NEWSROOM| Devils Lake Journal

Steve Martinez Takes Principled Stand Against Use of Grand Jury to Repress Indigenous Environmental Movement

BISMARK- Water Protector Steve Martinez is confined in Burleigh County Detention Center after refusing, on principle, to give testimony before a federal grand jury. This Grand Jury, like the one at which Martinez refused to testify three years ago, ostensibly involves a criminal investigation into events leading to the grievous injury of Water Protector Sophia Wilansky. It has been the position of Morton County, ND that Ms. Wilansky was not injured as a result of excessive force by law enforcement, but by the actions of Water Protectors. In a federal civil rights lawsuit against Morton County, however, Wilansky says she was shot in the arm with a concussion grenade by a sheriffs deputy on November 20, 2016, when law enforcement attacked hundreds of unarmed people objecting to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) with high pressure fire hoses, impact munitions, explosive grenades and chemical weapons.

Opposition to DAPL rallied thousands of environmental and Indigenous rights activists to the Oceti Sakowin prayer camp at Standing Rock, ND in 2016 and 2017. These Water Protectors were met with heavily militarized intervention from the oil companys private security forces, the Morton County Sheriffs Office, and numerous assisting agencies. Since March, 2017, DAPL has leaked over 1000 gallons of oil into sensitive water sources, and the Energy Transfer link connecting DAPL to Texas has leaked over 5000 gallons of oil. On January 26, 2021, the appeals court in Washington D.C. upheld a lower court ruling which found that the permit allowing DAPL to cross beneath the Missouri River on unceded Lakota / Dakota / Nakota lands violated key federal environmental laws, by failing to consider the risk the pipeline poses to the Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous nations who depend on the river for drinking water, as well as cultural, spiritual, and economic survival. After years of struggle and irreversible harm to both land and people, the rulings affirm the positions of the Water Protectors, and mean that DAPL is currently operating illegally.

After Mr. Martinez refused to submit to a grand jury in 2017, US Attorneys released him from subpoena. Three years later, Mr. Martinez was served a new subpoena, just days after a significant ruling in Ms. Wilanskys civil suit. The near simultaneous timing of the civil order and the new grand jury subpoena casts doubt on the legitimacy of the subpoena, argued Martinez lawyers in a motion to excuse him from the Grand Jury. U.S. Magistrate Judge Alice Senechal denied that motion.

After Martinez appeared before the Grand Jury on February 3, and invoked his First and Fifth Amendment rights, Magistrate Judge Senechal ordered him to give testimony. Martinez refused. In a secret proceeding in a sealed courtroom, the Court held him in contempt of its order, and over the objections of counsel, had him confined until such time as he agrees to testify, or the Grand Jury investigation terminates up to 18 months.

The Governments efforts to force Steve Martinez to collaborate with the Federal Grand Jury seeking to shift the blame for Sophia Wilanskis injuries from law enforcement to Water Protectors have been plagued by due process violations, procedural errors, undue haste, and secrecy, say his lawyers. Martinez intends to challenge the finding of contempt, but remains prepared to serve the term of confinement, rather than participate in a proceeding characterized by secrecy and coercion.

Grand juries are secret proceedings, at which prosecutors control the presentation of evidence to grand jurors in an effort to secure an indictment. Neither defense counsel nor judges nor any member of the public may be present. Witnesses must answer questions or risk being jailed until either they are coerced into compliance, or the grand jury expires. Due to their secrecy, grand juries are highly susceptible to abuse, said attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen. There is a long history of grand juries being used to intimidate politically disfavored groups, from abolitionists to union organizers, anti-war advocates, and civil rights activists. This Grand Jury, which criminalizes movements for native sovereignty and environmental justice, is one more instance of such abuse.

In addition to his objections to the grand jury as an institution, Martinez believes it is being used to suppress his rights to assembly, association, religion, and free speech. In a call from jail Saturday morning, he reaffirmed his conviction, saying The state should not be intimidating people and trying to blame us for harm they caused. I didnt want to lose my freedom, but they are not going to break me. Martinez partner Leta Killer wrote in a heartfelt social media post: Yesterday, my love Steve Martinez stood his ground as a Grand Jury Resistor regarding the movement at Standing Rock. … [T]he Feds are still grasping straws trying not to be held accountable for the terrible things law enforcement did to peaceful, prayerful Water Protectors. … Seeds of awareness & unification [will] spread all over the world for voices to speak out [about the need] to protect our natural resources for all of our future generations. Martinez enjoys widespread support, as he joins, for the second time, a long line of activists committed to the welfare and self-determination of their movement communities. Mni Wiconi! (Water is Life!)

K. William Boyer is the Managing Editor of the Devils Lake News Journal. He can be reached at kboyer@gannett.com, or by phone at(701) 662-2127.

Be sure to follow Devils Lake Journal on our twitter page, @devilslakenews, and like us on Facebook!

The rest is here:
Indigenous Water Protector Jailed in North Dakota for Refusing to Cooperate With Secret Grand Jury - Devil's Lake Daily Journal