The court ruled on two related cases, Twitter v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google, in which victims of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State sought to hold Twitter and Google liable because the companies “aided and abetted” the deadly terrorists by not sufficiently moderating their platforms.

This line of argument strikes at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. As First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere argued in a commentary for Reason Magazine, Section 230, “promoted the ​​development of parental controls and filtering as an alternative to government censorship, and encouraged online platforms to allow free communication by immunizing them from liability for hosting speech by third parties. Crucially, Section 230 also ensured online platforms’ ability to regulate posts that violate their terms of service.”

The liability protections for online platform operators is critical.

Can you imagine what the internet would be like today if a website could be held liable because a single user posted something offensive?

The challenges in the cases before the U.S. Supreme Court tried to argue that Twitter and Google were liable because terrorist propaganda could be accessible through their platforms.

In the Google case, the argument was made that Google, which owns video streaming site Youtube, was specifically liable because of the algorithmic video recommendation system on Youtube. This, they argued, could mean that terrorist recruitment videos could be recommended to someone using Youtube.

The court, however, rightly saw the flaw in these types of arguments.

“The mere creation of those platforms, however, is not culpable. To be sure, it might be that bad actors like ISIS are able to use platforms like defendants’ for illegal—and sometimes terrible—ends. But the same could be said of cell phones, email, or the internet generally,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas.

Opined Cato Institute policy analyst Will Duffield, “In a world where the basic business models and default openness of major social media platforms has come under attack, this recognition is valuable in any context. Paired with the court’s decision to pass up an opportunity to reinterpret Section 230, it is a victory for free speech worth celebrating.”

Indeed.

Section 230 has been in the headlines over the years, mostly because it has been under attack by both the left and right. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have called for it to be repealed, with Trump going so far as to threaten to veto the annual defense budget bill if Section 230 repeal wasn’t included.

There’s little doubt much of the anger about Section 230 is a result of ignorance about what it does, what it doesn’t do and why it matters

The section has been scapegoated as somehow the culprit behind real or perceived bias on major internet platforms. But, of course, in a free country with a First Amendment, internet platform owners can be as biased as they want if they wish. That’s just free speech.

This said, it is for the best that the Supreme Court declined these recent challenges to internet freedom.

Back in February, members of the California Association of Professional Scientists — a union that represents scientists in the state’s myriad regulatory agencies — overwhelmingly rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s offer to boost pay by 2% to 4%. The union says their pay, which averages $7,400 a month plus generous benefits, lags state engineers and federal scientists by 40%.

Had the union been reasonable, negotiations might have been fruitful. The union demanded raises of up to 43% to address the so-called disparities. It has been in the midst of a three-year bargaining dispute. As the Sacramento Bee reports, the union has been calling for dramatic pay increases since a 2005 contract increased engineer salaries. Rank-and-file scientists are still seething over a 2014 court case that boosted pay for supervisors, but not scientists.

Now, the Legislature is intervening.

Last week, the Assembly Appropriations Committee approved Assembly Bill 1677, which directs the union-friendly UC Berkeley Labor Center to study this particular bargaining unit’s salary structure.

At some point, the union might want to cut its losses and accept a deal.

This isn’t exactly the best time to be pushing for 435 raises given that California is facing a $31.5-billion budget deficit. California state employees, including its scientists, perform some important tasks but they earn enviable pay and benefits packages.

This one relatively small labor dispute speaks volumes about Capitol politics and the way one bargaining unit’s pay creates an upward ratchet for other bargaining units.

Unions don’t always win, but it’s time for the state to base all of its pay levels more on market conditions and less on union power.

It’s more than a little … perhaps shocking, perhaps ironic … that after being the victim of an absurd age-based bit of commentary on the part of the departed CNN host Don Lemon, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley feels the urge to lay on a bit of ageism herself.

But, after being called out at the ripe old age of 51 by Lemon as a woman likely “past her prime,” Haley, having taken it, somehow felt like dishing it out.

In April, Haley said: “I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.”

And how do you really feel about the president’s chances of even surviving the next five years, Ambassador Haley?

Given the aging of the electorate, and the fact that so many Americans are living very full lives at advanced years that just a few generations ago would have been considered positively geriatric, Haley expressing as “a matter of fact” her feelings that the president will soon be dead is perhaps not the best political move to make.

On the other hand, perhaps she is just giving voice to what even many allies of President Biden are whispering; what Democratic voters are known to be concerned about; what many GOP leaders are increasingly unafraid to mention: Biden, at 80 the oldest president ever to hold office, is going to have to deal with the issue of his, well, increasingly senior status if he goes ahead with his plans to seek re-election.

Sen. Ted Cruz called Biden “142 years old.”

Politics, as they say, ain’t bean-bag.

But, in a recent piece for Politico, longtime television political analyst and five-time Emmy winner Jeff Greenfield went straight to the heart of the succession matter regarding Biden’s age: “Particularly if the GOP sees Vice President Kamala Harris as a weaker figure than President Joe Biden, the attacks on her as a potential president will only increase.”

If Biden is historically unpopular with Americans when they are polled about him, with many Democrats who voted for him in 2020 longing for someone else to be their party’s standard-bearer in 2024, Harris’s poll numbers are even worse.

This editorial board has been among the most critical voices about Kamala Harris’s failing ever-upward on her political path for many years now. Ever since an editorial board meeting with us as she ran for United States Senate in which she touted a truancy plan she created as San Francisco district attorney and yet admitted that she had no idea — none — about how successful it had been in actually reducing truancy, it has been hard to view her as anything but all self-serving talk, no action.

She moves on from job to job — DA to attorney general to senator to presidential candidate to vice president — without much to show for it, with little gravitas, with no stick-to-it-iveness, riding hard on the certainly interesting and very California circumstances of her life story as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrant parents.

Historically, Greenfield points out, vice presidential candidates and actual vice presidents have been problematic for their bosses but in the end not very consequential to a ticket’s success. Dan Quayle was no genius, and, as Sen. Lloyd Bentsen quipped in a debate, “no Jack Kennedy,” but his ticket with George H.W. Bush on top still won by 8 percentage points. Sarah Palin was seen as a weight on candidate John McCain’s presidential bid, but a later study from UC Irvine showed that she had no effect on the election.

Should Biden dump the unpopular Harris from his ticket? There certainly are better candidates out there. But to do so would perhaps invite as much criticism as it would praise, and would likely lose some voters as well as winning some.

And, just to speculate, wouldn’t it be something to see a vice-presidential debate between a Kamala Harris and let’s say a Nikki Haley, two American women with roots in India and very different politics indeed? The advanced ages of the men who are likely to be atop those tickets would recede as an issue for the moment and two women very much in their prime could have at it.

Practically, the city’s efforts to resist complying with state housing laws have proven to be costly failures.

In 2020, the city reached a settlement with the California Department of Housing and Community Development to build more units than were in its 2015 housing plan.

Left in the air were payments to the Kennedy Commission of Irvine, an affordable-housing advocate, for legal costs the commission said were a “catalyst” prodding the city to action.

On May 11, the Register reported, the 6th District Court of Appeal sided with the Commission and ordered the city to pay $3.5 million in legal fees.

The city needs to remember it must comply with state housing laws, especially the ones recently enacted to deal with the twin crises of homelessness and staggeringly high home and apartment prices, such as Senate Bills 9 and 10 from 2021 and Senate Bill 1333 from 2018.

“It’s pretty clear cities all have to do their part to address the homelessness and housing prices here in Orange County,” Kennedy Commission Executive Director Cesar Covarrubias told us. “Every city has a role to play. They all have to have strong policies to address the housing needs of all income segments. Housing in general just is not affordable to large segments of the population.”

He said average rents for most developments are in the $3,500 to $4,000 per month range for family units. Vast segments of Orange County’s population, and the population across the state for that matter, can’t pursue the California Dream of home ownership. “Supply needs to be available for all our income segments,” he said.

Potentially, the May 11 decision itself could be appealed to the California Supreme Court. The Huntington Beach City Council met May 16. Public Affairs Manager Jennifer Carey told us nothing has been disclosed, yet, about what was discussed in closed session. And so far an appeal has not been “agendized” for a future session.

The council should skip a further appeal and start meeting the obvious housing needs seen all around us.

Cities like Huntington Beach opposing state laws facilitating greater housing construction unfortunately helped create the housing shortage by restricting where and what types of housing can be built.

There are other drivers, to be sure, including state overregulation and abuse of the California Environmental Quality Act.

But city overregulation and restric

tion is a problem too.

Appeals to “local control” in the context of housing have always just been a nice-sounding defense of local government overreach and interference in the housing market.

We don’t like top-down edicts from the state either, but at least the state has tried to remove some long outdated land-use restrictions and nudged cities to do the same.

The number really is shocking: $31.4 trillion — with a “t.” That’s the current debt ceiling for the U.S. government. With the COVID-19 emergency now officially over and the nation not at war, there’s no excuse for raising it even higher unless budget reforms are enacted to bring it down, pronto.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the projected 2023 deficit is $1.4 trillion, or 5.3% of GDP, but it could grow to 6.9% by 2033.

The rate of growth of the federal debt has likewise been significant and is expected to only get worse. Federal debt held by the public is projected to rise from 98% of GDP in 2023 to 118% in 2033 — an average increase of 2 percentage points per year,” the CBO explained. “Over that period, the growth of interest costs and mandatory spending outpaces the growth of revenues and the economy, driving up debt. Those factors persist beyond 2033, pushing federal debt higher still, to 195% of GDP in 2053.”

With rising debt and rising interest payments on that debt comes a slower economy, as money that could’ve gone toward more productive uses ends up going down the drain.

That’s the reality behind the desire of President Biden and Democrats in Congress to raise the debt ceiling even higher to avoid the government defaulting on its obligations on June 1. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who met with Biden at the White House Tuesday afternoon, and his Republican majority are insisting on major cuts.

According to The New York Times, the budget bill the GOP House passed in April would cut spending 14% over the next decade, as well as cut some of Biden’s new social and climate programs.

Tuesday afternoon Axios reported a group of moderate Democrats are trying to encourage McCarthy to work out a compromise with the White House with a promise to support him from being ousted by his own party from the speakership. But McCarthy spokesperson Mark Bednar told the news site, “The speaker has never heard of this garbage.”

It makes for good fundraising letters and text messages on both sides. But this is part of the disco dance leading up to an inevitable compromise.

“The responsible choice is to raise the debt ceiling along with fiscal reforms,” Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, told us. “The GOP proposal is quite modest, with spending caps and using unspent COVID relief funds. Other than that, it’s just a Band-Aid on a wound otherwise gushing deficits.”

This seems reasonable to us. With COVID now officially over, no war and unemployment low, there’s no reason to increase spending on new programs. After the wild deficits of recent years — $2.6 trillion in 2021 and $1.4 trillion in 2022 — this ought to be a time of paying down debt, or at least not raising it excessively. We urge Southern California members of Congress to act prudently.

The bill, which won’t get anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, calls for resuming construction of a border and mandate a national E-Verify program for employers to verify the eligibility of those they hire, among other provisions.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy was clearly pleased with passage of the bill, declaring it “the strongest border security bill to pass through Congress in more than 100 years.”

Of course, “strongest” doesn’t mean “best” nor does it mean “viable” in this case.

This editorial board has questioned the merits of a border wall as well as E-Verify.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of two Republicans in the House to oppose the bill, rightly noted that such a mandate greatly expands the reach of the federal government in employment decisions.

“I will not vote to require every American to get Biden’s permission if they want to work,” Massie tweeted. “Specifically, I’m opposed to E-verify. Giving the federal government more power over YOU is a mistake in my opinion. I support border security, but not E-verify.”

Echoing this was California Republican John Duarte, who warned, “The mandatory E-Verify in this bill would have caused a lot of companies to lose very, very important employees, and would have criminalized a lot of our employers here in the Valley who have been using E-Verify.”

Indeed, the E-Verify system is not error-proof. To the extent that it has been used in certain states, errors in the form of misidentifying workers as ineligible have disrupted the employment of 760,000 workers as of 2019, according to the Cato Institute.

If scaled up across the country, even with a low error rate, the number of workers denied employment will be quite high. That is unacceptable.

There are legitimate issues for Congress to debate and legislate on when it comes to the border and immigration policy.

However, legislation with no chance of getting anywhere isn’t the way to anything. There must be serious, bipartisan effort to come up with workable solutions that don’t just sound good to any party’s base.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday released his $307 billion May budget revision and the news is grim. The state is facing a $31.5 billion shortfall — $9 billion higher than the governor had predicted when he unveiled his budget in January. Obviously, this means that Newsom and the Legislature will need to roll make some tough choices before the June budget deadline.

The governor’s latest proposal is a mixed bag. Let’s start with the most encouraging news. Newsom rejected a proposal by Senate Democrats to raise taxes on large corporations — an idea that would only exacerbate California’s budget woes. That plan would raise corporate taxes on income above $1.5 million by 2 percentage points.

Yet California businesses already are struggling and many of them are scaling back operations. The top 1% of earners pay nearly 50% of state income taxes, which leads to the boom-and-bust cycles whereby officials boost spending programs and then pare them back during downturns.

The last two budget cycles call attention to this dilemma. Last year, the state enjoyed an unfathomable $97.5-billion budget surplus on the heels of a tech-driven boom. Bay Area tech companies now are laying off thousands of workers and the economy heads toward a recession. We’re still frustrated that lawmakers didn’t use the surplus to put the state on a firmer footing.

Fortunately, the administration is paring back some of its most aggressive spending plans, including a plan to spend $54 billion over the next five years for various climate-change proposals. Also encouraging: Newsom remains firmly opposed to tapping the state’s rainy day fund — money that’s needed if a recession takes hold.

We’re also pleased that Newsom is resisting calls to bail out struggling transit agencies, despite complaints from Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Los Angeles, who argued that “public transit is the vanguard of Californian’s fight against climate change.” But transit ridership hasn’t fully recovered since the pandemic for reasons that have nothing to do with funding. Transit systems need to improve their operation rather than seek bailouts.

On the bad side, Newsom also is committed to staying the course on ramped up spending for a host of social-spending programs. To continue on that path, the governor is proposing various budget gimmicks that, as the Mercury News reported, largely shift general-fund spending to other sources — such as tapping special funds such as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

The governor also wants to rely on state bonds. Such bonds don’t directly raise taxes, but they tie the hands of future legislatures. They are meant for capital investments, not everyday spending. If a program is important, the state should fund it on a pay-as-you go basis. But that would require tough choices that lawmakers have been reluctant to make.

Because or their small minority, California Republicans have no leverage in budget negotiations. The GOP calls the deficit a “wakeup call to all Democrats that after years of increased spending, they should have better results to point to than an outrageous cost of living, surging crime, rampant homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, failing schools and inadequate water storage.” They have a point.

Although the governor’s plan avoids the worst pitfalls, it represents more business as usual — and that means a continued focus on maintaining spending rather than actually fix major problems.

Upset at the coverage, Newsom’s spokesman posted a clarifying tweet, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “Gov. Newsom is *not* backing away from cash payments, but wants to wait for the report in its entirety to arrive on his desk before he makes any decision.”

Newsom clearly is trying to placate progressive activists who are championing a broad and ideologically charged reparations program and voters, who are strongly opposed to reparations. Yet Newsom signed into law the measure that created this task force. His political dilemma is of his own making.

Beyond short-term politics, the California Reparations Task Force report offers a blueprint for tearing apart the state’s social fabric, obliterating its budget and setting California on a course of endless debates about historical injustices. The report admits that its proposals only are a “down payment” toward rectifying policies that date back to 1850.

This approach leads to myriad practical problems, too. These include measuring a person’s race, determining residency requirements and assessing specific harms from difficult-to-assess standards involving housing discrimination, mass incarceration, healthcare inequities and the “devaluation” of African American businesses.

It also opens the door to claims from other groups. California passed a spate of anti-Chinese laws in the late 1800s. Likewise, the state passed discriminatory laws aimed at its Mexican population as well as an infamous anti-Okie law during the Dust Bowl migration. California wasn’t a slave state, although Congress granted concessions to slave-holding Southerners as part of that statehood compromise.

The task force’s calculations make one’s head spin. Here’s how it would determine payments based on healthcare inequities: “Take an individual’s value of statistical life (roughly $10,000,000) and divide it by the white non-Hispanic life expectancy in California (78.6 years in 2021) to obtain the value for each year of life absent racial discrimination ($127,226).”

That’s just one formula in a payment plan that attempts to rectify hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and could reportedly pay African American residents as much as $1.2 million. The nation’s history is fraught with racial and ethnic conflict, but trying to determine damages to current groups based on history is not the way to achieve equality.

The report also details a hodgepodge of wrongheaded policy ideas beyond financial payouts. Most of those have nothing to do with past injustices and everything to do with modern progressive political notions. For instance, the task force calls for California to repeal or amend Proposition 209, the 1996 initiative that forbids racial and ethnic bias in public accommodations. Furthermore, the task force calls for making Election Day a paid state holiday, restoring voting rights to prison inmates, ending cash bail, increasing Medi-Cal reimbursement rates, repealing the state’s three-strikes law and further raising the state’s minimum wage.

The Legislature and the governor will have the final say on the recommendations, but such politically charged and divisive nonsense should never have gotten this far. For that, we blame the governor.

Two cheers for democracy, as Mencken had it, half-praise that so aptly applies to so much of what our elected leaders get up to in the state they run. So much of their time is spent micromanaging the economy and on ensuring that members of the public-employee unions that make their lifestyles possible are also well-compensated, that it can be hard to laser-focus on the actual societal problems that all of us see every day: sick, sad people by the tens of thousands and more living on our streets.

Under the governor’s proposed plan, we the voters will be participating in the hard democratic decisions about how to provide mental-health care. Newsom this spring unveiled a bond measure that, if put on the ballot by the Legislature and then approved by we the people, would raise billions of dollars to build mental-centers, housing and treatment facilities all over the state. His proposed bond measure would raise $3 billion for mental health campuses  and permanent housing for the unhoused.

Of course it’s a good idea to finally come to grips with big holes left in the well-meaning but almost entirely unfulfilled promise of mental-health reforms passed by legislators of both parties and approved by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967. But is Newsom’s plan the right one? And does he have the political skill to convince Californians it is?

If it could go a long way to providing treatment for the mentally ill among us, many Californians would probably consider the interest payments on that $3 billion we would all be paying a bargain. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

We do have hope for the governor’s CARE Court, which allows family members and physicians to petition judges to get mentally ill family members into care. In April, the California Supreme Court rejected a challenge to it.

There’s also Senate Bill 43, which  would significantly lower the bar on getting distressed people into treatment. Can California find the appropriate balance? That remains to be seen, but at least we’re having these debates.

California has an extremely progressive tax code, with a top marginal rate of 13.3% on taxable income above $1 million. But you don’t have to earn a million dollars to feel the bite of the state income tax. For a single filer, the tax rate on taxable income between $23,943 and $37,778 is 4%. Above $37,789 the rate jumps to 6%, above $52,456 the rate is 8%, above $66,296 the rate is 9.3% and it just goes up from there.

See: Would a wealth tax drive the rich out of California?

A small percentage of tax filers pay most of the personal income tax revenue in California, with the consequence that if high-earning taxpayers leave the state, the effect on the budget can be significant. According to data from the Franchise Tax Board, in tax year 2020 there were 346,329 tax returns showing adjusted gross income of $500,000 or more. These were just 1.9% of all tax returns filed, but they accounted for 57.1% of the personal income tax revenue collected by the state.

According to federal tax returns filed in 2020 and 2021, over 700,000 individuals bolted from California between 2019 and 2020. The IRS says those taxpayers took more than $50 billion in adjusted gross income with them to their new state.

See: Leaving California? Here are the best job markets out there

The top destination for ex-Californians was Texas, with 105,434 individuals relocating there. It’s probably not a coincidence that Texas has no state income tax. More than 63,000 Californians are now living in Arizona, which has a flat tax of 2.5% on individual income. Nearly 55,000 moved to Nevada and 40,730 moved to Florida, two more states that have no state income tax. Washington, which does not tax individual income except for the capital gains of high earners, saw 46,677 Californians move in.

See: Californians are among the happiest people in the country. So why are they leaving the state?

California has been losing population to other states for years, but as the Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in a report last August, “in the past, outmigration tended to be more pronounced among lower income Californians.” That has changed, the LAO acknowledged. “In recent years the state has seen an increase in net outflows across all income brackets,” the report stated. “Historically, upticks in outmigration have been associated with periods of rapid increases in the cost of living.”

See: Leaving California? Here are the healthiest states to consider

The LAO also noted an increase in movement within the state as residents fled urban areas for more rural ones. “Even though this was, to some degree, an intensification of an existing trend, it remains to be seen whether this pattern will endure or whether it was an oddity of the pandemic,” the analyst reported.

State policy makers should be deeply troubled by the fact that so many Californians who were willing to pay reasonable taxes for decent public services found that they have neither in California.