The Center for Media and Democracy has found that the state of Wisconsin has purged over 700,000 voters from its rolls since the 2016 election -- and (get your surprised face ready) purged more of them in Democratic-leaning counties than Republican ones. That still didn't help Republicans in various state special elections in 2018, but note well that Wisconsin has fewer than six million people to begin with. And yes, they used the old respond-to-this-postcard-to-prove-you-haven't-moved trick. If this "blue wave" doesn't materialize, I sure hope our "liberal" media starts covering vote suppression more vigorously. The alternative is hearing pundits say well, I guess Americans just wants to be racist and there's nothing we can do about it.
Straight-ticket voters in six Texas counties report problems with voting machines failing to report or even changing their votes for U.S. Senate. You have to hit two buttons simultaneously to produce the error -- which seems a little like unnecessary effort to me, but it's also should be harder to flummox a voting machine than that, and we didn't have this problem back when we had paper ballots. And of course government officials cry poor when it comes to replacing nine-year-old voting machines. They could tax the rich and corporations a little harder, maybe?
Fox News mistakenly yeah-sure shows a couple of still photos of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) -- who could, I suppose, be our next President -- during an alert about a shooting suspect/sex offender on the loose in Utah. Because who doesn't get the two mixed up? Fox News ran a correction 45 minutes later, but they know as well as the rest of us that nobody hears the corrections, and their millions of rage-addled viewers all got to associate Kamala Harris with criminal behavior, so mission accomplished! That's why we need to be able to pay for cable channels a la carte -- you may not have liked what Fox News did, but you still paid for it, and they won't stop doing it until they're staring at the possibility of losing lots of money.
Speaking of The Worst of the Very Bad Cable News Networks, a Fox News host claims that the pipe bombs sent to various liberal and pseudo-liberal political figures last week were actually "threatening-looking devices" and thus not "actual threats." Uh, no: if it looks like a threat, it's a threat, and the act of concluding that it only "looks like a threat" does not actually prevent it from going off. Such post-modernists they have at Fox News -- I mean, it's not even the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet! (Her right-wing guest disagreed with her, but big whoop -- Fox News loves playing up all the hair-splitting differences between right-wingers so as to help ward off charges of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement about everything.)
Finally, Tucker Carlson wrings his hands on Twitter asking "(h)ow'd we get to a place where it's normal that two parts of the country despise each other?" Gosh, I don't know -- because you and your kind have been complete assholes to everyone who disagrees with you for years? But here's the good news: when right-wingers start whining like this, they're on their heels. Let's keep them there.
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