Aaron Sankin at Reveal reminds us of the other problem with the notorious Interstate Crosscheck voter info database: it's vulnerable to hackers, and thus exposes the personal data of millions of voters to identity theft. I wonder if that was a feature, not a bug! Seriously, I'll be happy if this is the reason the twenty-plus states still using Crosscheck to purge voters stop using it, though eight states have apparently stopped using Crosscheck for that purpose but are still sending voter data through an insecure system. (Also, consider that even though these states still sending voter data to Crosscheck may not be using Crosscheck to purge their own voter rolls, other states may be using that info to purge theirs.)
Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reports that Muslim terror suspects get on average seven times the "liberal" media attention that white terror suspects get, and their sentences are on average four times longer. This is not a terribly surprising development, once you recall how urgently our "liberal" media has rushed to portray various white terror suspects (the Planned Parenthood bomber and the Austin bomber leap to mind) with adjectives like "troubled," a courtesy our "liberal" media most emphatically does not extend to terrorists of the more Muslim persuasion, though surely they're just as human as white people, right? In any case, it sure is nice to have some hard data behind it.
Stan Collender at Forbes suggests that our President might try to get around the most recent appropriations bill by simply refusing to appropriate the money as the law has directed. And then dance around with no pants on, no doubt, while his votaries all squeal HE DID IT FOR US!!!!! If a President refuses to appropriate money as Congress has mandated, Congress gets to pass another bill forcing him to do so -- which means that if this President decides to throw up his hands, we'd be relying on Republican-held Congresses to do more than stamp their feet about it. Like Republicans didn't already think of all of that! It's win-win for them -- they get their cherished spending cuts and they get to blame the President for them!
Dig the balls on Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, in the wake of Republicans losing yet another election there, saying that the left is the side of "anger and hatred." What recent Republican policy prescription has not been driven by "anger and hatred" -- specifically, the anger and hatred of Our Glorious Elites toward the American people? It's good, at least, to be reminded why Scott Walker is so dangerous -- not just because he remembers to claim that his side is the side of "optimism," but because he'll say up is down like up really is down, and thus persuades people who don't have the time (or the compulsion!) to attend these matters as closely as we do, but who do respond intuitively to "people who seem to know what they're talking about."
Portugal produced just about all of its electrical requirements for the month of March via renewable energy. Now, more than half of March's renewable power yield came from hydroelectricity, and not every nation's borders are nearly half coastline like Portugal's, but Portugal also met over 40 percent of its energy needs with wind power, and I can think of a few well-developed nations that don't do that well. Please, right-wingers, don't squeal that Portugal still had to use some fossil fuels over the month of March due to renewable energy storage issues, because a) it wasn't much and b) that's no justification for handing out corporate welfare to fossil fuel corporations or drilling off every conceivable coast.
Finally, Laura Ingraham just took a week off her Fox News show after being on the blunt end of a massive boycott for ridiculing one of the Parkland school shooting survivors, and some "liberal" media journalists are complaining that boycotts are bad and you should always meet speech with more speech, but Atrios reminds us why that's utter bunk. It isn't just that you and I can't get our speech out there the way a Laura Ingraham can, or that the First Amendment doesn't actually guarantee you a right to a paid gig for your speech, let alone immunity from criticism or adverse action from advertisers and activists -- it's also that people like Laura Ingraham are not actual journalists. They're what the industry calls "talent," and what I call (when I'm feeling very generous) "newsreaders." Journalists do seem awfully upset about the power of boycotts these days; does that mean they'd be even more upset about a la carte cable packaging?
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