Whether you agree or disagree with the death penalty, I really don’t see how the Troy Davis case (the latest: the prison officials won’t offer him a polygraph test, apparently out of fear it might contradict their plans to kill him) does anything but show that the Georgia system is flawed. When seven of nine …
I wonder if this guy is going to be taken aside by some of his more PR-savvy Republican friends. Many of us liberals have known this for years, but here it’s said right out loud to a national journalist: These cuts are less about saving money and more about abortion and contraception. Evangelicals and Tea …
Digby has an article in al-Jazeera presenting an overview of recent and not-so-recent Republican attempts to keep the minority vote down in elections. The Bush Department of Justice more or less closed down the civil rights division, which had monitored compliance with the Voting Rights Act. It even concocted an illegal scheme to replace US …
Continue reading ‘More on voting rights and their suppression’ »
Now NPR has taken up the story. The sanctimony of the Kansas Secretary of State is infuriating: Kobach says there have been 221 incidents of voter fraud since 1997 in Kansas, evidence that he calls “the tip of the iceberg.” About 30 of those cases were investigated and seven people were convicted. So, in 13 …
Continue reading ‘More on Republican anti-(Democratic)-voter measures’ »
Dear President Obama, While you’re pushing for good middle-class jobs, could you plump for some upper-class ones too? I’d really appreciate one at my age and in my physical condition. Sincerely, Linkmeister
You know, this whole Solyndra bankruptcy and subsequent “gotcha” game proves once again that Americans don’t even know their own history. Back in the 1860s, even during the Civil War, Congress concluded that it would be a good thing to have railroads connect the West to the Midwest. It lent hundreds of millions of dollars …
Continue reading ‘Ignorance of history is regrettably common’ »
The Senate got past Senator Coburn’s objections to highway beautification and bike paths in the transportation bill, so the FAA has been reauthorized. Disaster relief funds are still being held up by the troglodytes in the House, who insist that tornado, storm and flood victims can’t be helped unless some other constituency (preferably a Democratic …
It’s not just for Congressional Districts anymore! This time the Republicans want to take over an entire state’s electoral votes, by changing from the “winner-take-all” system that’s been in place for 200 years in Pennsylvania to “one electoral vote per Congressional District plus one for each Senate seat.” Under the Republican plan, if the GOP …
News item: . . .46.2 million people now live in poverty in the United States, the highest number in the 52 years the Census Bureau has been tracking it, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Poverty Statistic Branch at the Census Bureau. Depressing as that is, the explanation is even worse: Joblessness was the driving …