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Showing posts from November, 2017

Respect for the office...

I like how people say if I can't respect the 45, then respect the office of the POTUS. I respond, "Why? You elected Trump as president, knowing full well he was unfit, and you didn't care. How is that respecting the office?"

Voter Suppression Security Flaws

From Indivisible.org, how big data is being used for voter suppression--and how inept the oppressors are with sensitive information: On October 23, a story broke in Mother Jones, ProPublica, and Think Progress that caused a big stir in voting rights circles. A group of citizens in Illinois ha d discovered some smoking-gun evidence that the problematic Interstate Crosscheck program had some major security issues—and that key people knew about them. WHAT DID YOU GUYS DISCOVER? COULD YOU WALK US THROUGH THE SECURITY PROBLEMS YOU FOUND? Within the past two weeks we discovered massive security failures in the Crosscheck program and in how the Illinois State Board of Elections (SBE) handles voter data.   We sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to Illinois and other states for information about the program. We were startled by what we got back. For starters, we received multiple usernames and passwords that election officials use to log in to voter data and Cross...

A Rotting Mustard Seed

So much criticism of Liberalism posits that the idea of social and cultural progress at the expense of tradition is balloon-juice at best, hedonism at worst. At the heart of this critique is the (often unspoken) catechism "we have to live in the real world" usually expressed in historical anecdotes carefully chosen to prop up this restricted viewpoint. How telling is this look to the past--the history of economic/cultural repression justified by "that's just how things are" to keep us frozen in an eternal profit-loss margin continually favoring a fortunate wealthy few, a trade of a few shekels for the souls of the American people, using historical merit to maintain this obvious lie. Since the historical evidence is overwhelmingly against this worldview, such support from the past must be treated as an article of faith. Anyone who uses this faith to justify the violent treatment of people based on color, gender, status or income is someone who has a vested inter...

Red, White and Blue Bruising

It never ceases to amaze me how Conservatives condemn socialism, yet the conservative answer to every issue, political, social and cultural, is to beat us all over the head with the economy and ram it down our throats. Money is the go-to weapon, the default stance of the GOP. Money must flow from our hands into the hands of ultra-conservatives. In order to keep the money flowing into their coffers, conservatives must lie, cheat, steal and wage wars, with overt applause from their closet fascitti supporters--all the while sneering at Liberals for being "unrealistic."

The Law of the Gun

In case we haven't figured it out yet, the NRA wants to kill us all. After the recent shooting in a Colorado Wal-Mart, police then reviewed the store videos to see what the killer did while in the store. But the police discovered several people in the Wal-Mart drew their own guns at the sound of gunshots. So the police had to track each gun handler one by one to determine who was the true killer; wasting valuable time and effort to conduct their investigation. This result is  deliberate; this is what our paranoid NRA is after, a cloud of confusion to frustrate all efforts to prosecute killers who use firearms of any kind to slaughter women and/or people of color. The more guns in use, the more difficult it is to bring murderers to justice. If everyone is armed, all can act with impunity. For the NRA, any gun is a ticket marked "get out of jail free." No longer subject to the rule of law – justice and due process superseded by a sacrosanct 2nd amendment – potential killers...