https://twitter.com/MikeElgan/status/1227427493742669825?s=20
Very cyberpunk, in a way.
Rotary-dial cellphone
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Full Indy endorsements, for local folks
Indy state-level endorsements + fun writing
https://indyweek.com/news/elections/2020-primary-endorsements-governor-council-of-state/
No, really, they really are a liberal rag; they just endorse Republicans sometimes to fool you.
«Republican: Christine Mumma
The only plausible Republican to replace Josh Stein, Mumma is the executive director of the North Carolina Commission on Actual Innocence, and she’s represented nine people who’ve been exonerated for crimes they didn’t commit. Her two opponents are unremarkable. This one’s easy.
….
Republican: Mike Causey
Say what you want about Mike Causey, but don’t say he’s corrupt. When developer Greg Lindberg tried to bribe him to fire an unfriendly senior regulator, Causey reported him to the feds and then wore a wire, leading to Lindberg’s arrest (and that of two associates) and the arrest of the NCGOP’s chairman.….
Republican: None of these
It’ll take some effort to be a worse labor commissioner than our departing elevator queen, Cherie Berry. But by God, these three—Chuck Stanley, Josh Dobson, and Pearl Floyd—are going to try.»
Indy endorses Warren
https://indyweek.com/news/elections/2020-primary-endorsements-president-congress/
The Independent, the Research Triangle’s liberal rag whose investigative reporting is a thorn in the side of NC conservatives, has endorsed @ewarren.
Elizabeth Warren is in New Hampshire, running for president against fear itself – The Washington Post
Wow. This is a surprisingly good article. I gotta say, though: I don’t agree w/the assumption she’s going to lose. Buttigieg will peak soon. Sanders may still fall short, just as he did in 2016. Biden is weaker than everybody thought (except some of us). I actually think she’s running the right campaign. Persisting, you might say.
Some quotes:
«What I think this man means is that ever since 2016, we have been trapped in a vague debate about electability, and whether it’s only men who have it. In the fog of uncertainty over Hillary Clinton’s complicated defeat (she neglected Wisconsin, she used a private email server, she was a “nasty woman” slain by weaponized misogyny, she still won the popular vote), the debate has mutated into an abstract panic about whether any woman can get elected in 2020.
….
These days, of course, people don’t say, “I won’t vote for a woman”; they say, “I’m scared my moderate father-in-law needs a man on the ballot to motivate him to the polls.”
….
But Warren’s supporters, more than anyone else, said they’d vote for whomever they needed to vote for.
One way to read this is that Warren doesn’t have crossover appeal: She appeals only to the folks who would have voted Democratic no matter what. Another way to read this is that her supporters are as practical as they are passionate: There’s an outcome they’d prefer, but if it doesn’t happen, they’ll move on to the next best thing. They’ve got a plan for that.
After talking to enough of her fans, I think it’s the second explanation. The second explanation, mixed with something deeper:
Loving Elizabeth Warren means planning for America to break your heart.»
BUT NOT YET and maybe just not, period. I want to emphasize that. She can win, the primary and the general, despite what Twitter says.
‘The intelligence coup of the century’
WOW. Some random quotes:
«U.S. officials were even more alarmed when Wagner hired a gifted electrical engineer in 1978 named Mengia Caflisch. She had spent several years in the United States working as a radio-astronomy researcher for the University of Maryland before returning to her native Switzerland and applying for a job at Crypto. Wagner jumped at the chance to hire her. But NSA officials immediately raised concerns that she was “too bright to remain unwitting.”
The warning proved prescient as Caflisch soon began probing the vulnerabilities of the company’s products.
….
To the CIA, Widman had an even more important attribute: an affinity for the United States that he had formed while spending a year in Washington state as an exchange student.»
Starvation & malnutrition in the world
UNICEF has a massive data set: https://globalnutritionreport.org/reports/global-nutrition-report-2018/dataset-and-metadata/
WHO has a list of other health issues associated with malnutrition: https://www.who.int/emergencies/famine/en/ (scroll down to “Diseases in famine”).
Some random guy has a pretty map: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrition/by-country/
I’m really surprised to see the U.S.’s position in the death-due-to-malnutrition ranking on the map site. But I wonder… how good is the map’s data, and where is a map of the UNICEF data? Stupid web.
Some conservatives (sometimes me, too, in the past) state that wealth and income inequality are irrelevant because, of course, in the world’s wealthiest countries, some folks are going to be extremely wealthy but the folks at the other end of the scale are just fine, so the inequality is a false issue.
Except… it’s not.
(And I wonder what the racial makeup of the folks starving to death is. I have a feeling….)
Phone banking, eww
Ok, so… I just went WAY out of my comfort zone and called a bunch of random people in New Hampshire (from North Carolina), most of whom hung up on me, some of whom were hostile and one awesome @ewarren supporter. I want my gold star. And music, but I don’t know if I want pounding industrial or lounge.
Dem voter education should include provisional ballots
https://twitter.com/Greg_Palast/status/1226570304387870720?s=20
Seems like Dem voter education should include “how to fill out a provisional ballot”.
Greg Palast (@Greg_Palast) Tweeted:
BREAKING: In an extraordinary move, Judge Eleanor Ross has declared #BrianKemp the loser in a lawsuit brought by our team to compel the State of #Georgia to open up its complete files on the mass purge of over half a million voters from the rolls.
Carville on the Dems
I agree. I said something about coattails earlier.
«there’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public. Eighteen percent of the country elects more than half of our senators. That’s the deal, fair or not.
So long as [Mitch] McConnell runs the Senate, it’s game over. There’s no chance we’ll change the courts, and nothing will happen, and he’ll just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution.»
