The water engineer who helped expose the Flint water crisis thinks that tragedy is only the beginning of our troubles with our water supply. After all, the lead in Flint's water didn't cause all the infections, rashes, and hair loss -- other systemic problems did. And when public water systems fail because our governments keep handing out corporate welfare like candy, those same corporations will swoop in and declare that only they can do it right! Which will, of course, leave us in far worse straits -- your government, at least, belongs to you.
Washington state Supreme Court rules that a particularly odious anti-tax initiative would be unconstitutional. The initiative requires state legislators to propose a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds supermajority vote for all tax increases -- or else face a one percentage-point cut in the sales tax. That's even more of a hostage crisis than right-wingers usually try. And though I'm fairly opposed to sales taxes myself, I'm pretty confident I could win an argument about sales taxes on the merits, without resorting to Rube Goldbergian legislative contraptions.
Greg Palast and Dennis J. Bernstein reveal that California poll workers have been told to give independent voters provisional ballots, which is against the law there. Independent voters can vote in partisan primaries in California, and we all know what happens to provisional ballots -- they get thrown in the trash. California's primary, naturally, starts in three days.
President Obama calls for an expansion of Social Security benefits in a speech in Indiana. I feel compelled to note, however, that Mr. Obama will be out of office in a little over seven months and has a Congress that won't try to expand Social Security, so his support is not exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps he would have been better off thumping this saucepan back when his party had a 70-seat House majority and a filibuster-proof Senate majority. We know that using those huge majorities to appease Republicans sure didn't work.
Finally, we learn that "liberal" media coverage of that notorious Donald Trump press conference from earlier this week -- the one where he repeatedly insulted reporters who had questioned him about his donations to veterans' groups -- has, ah, tended toward the deferential. One CNN headline proclaimed that "When Donald Trump Hits Back, He Hits Back Hard." Is that what we're going to call it now when someone's too cowardly to admit that he misrepresented his donations to veterans' groups -- and, indeed, only coughed up the money after the Washington Post shamed him? I may have been premature in suggesting that maybe Donald Trump has insulted the "liberal" media one too many times.
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