Sen. Sanders says folks in prison should be able to vote, and gets an earful from center and right. Opponents center and right whine WHAT ABOUT TEH MURDURURZ ANDZ TEH TERRORIZTZ!!!!!, but they say that only to provoke rage in people. If folks in prison can vote, our government won't be able to throw people into prison to keep them from voting them out. Note well that the "war on drugs" mainly throws black and brown folks into prison, and you'll begin to see what that means.
Aimee Picchi at CBS News notes that if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses have grown since 1985, it'd be $33.51/hour today. And minimum wage workers do so much more for America than banksters do! No use whining that the minimum wage has gone up 116% since 1985, not just because it ignores Wall Street bonuses going up about 1,000 percent over the same time, but because inflation has gone up over 136% during that time. Something's tricking down, but it sure ain't wealth.
Fox News's Andrew Napolitano says that not only did our President obstruct justice numerous times during the Mueller investigation, his obstruction is also "immoral," because his obstruction didn't even "save a human life or to preserve human freedom" but merely "to save him from the consequences of his own behavior." Naturally Fox News relegated these insights to the internet, like all cable news corporations do when they don't want to rock the boat, but Mr. Napolitano's condemnation is still worth hearing -- and repeating.
You recall that deal that prohibits the IRS from offering free filing services to good Americans as long as private corporations like TurboTax offer the service? Well, it seems that Intuit (TurboTax's parent corporation) has inserted code on TurboTax's website that keeps Google from helping you find that free service!. So, in short: TurboTax has an agreement to keep the IRS from offering free filing services to taxpayers, says it'll offer the service instead, and then keeps you from seeing it in search engines. Nice work if you can get it! (Sadly for those who insist the "free" market must be allowed to solve every problem, H&R Block is doing the same thing.)
We learn from Motherboard that Twitter doesn't ban white supremacists from its platform the way it bans ISIS from its platform because the algorithms it uses to ban ISIS only catch a few peaceful Arabic-language sites, while a white supremacist ban would catch more than a few Republican politicians. And? You have a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government, but you do not have a First Amendment right to use Twitter, and if you think Twitter's banning you for no good reason, you have to prove it. I think right-wingers get so angry about the prospect of Twitter banning them because they can't prove it. I just wish their anger didn't scare Twitter into weakness. (And, ah, one more time: Twitter should hire people to moderate their boards instead of counting on computer software to do that. Hiring people is job creation, after all, and if Twitter can't pay people to do that very important work, then maybe Twitter shouldn't survive. Why is it always left to the liberal to be the hardass these days?)
Finally, George Goehl at The Guardian says something that should be fairly obvious in America: that if Democrats would fight big ag factory farms and all the pollution they cause, they'd win back rural voters. Of course, Democrats are counting on all that factory farm donation money, so they won't do something that might actually win back rural voters -- they'll go on pretending to be Republicans-lite about crime and drugs and immigration and "right-sizing regulations," which hasn't ever fooled anyone, really.
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