Thinking "I don't miss net neutrality"? Well, Northeastern/UMass-Amherst researchers have found that AT&T throttles Netflix and YouTube over two-thirds of the time and Amazon Prime not at all for its wireless customers. "(A)nd it’s not based on networks being overloaded," one of the researchers strains to point out. And every streaming service, as I'm sure you're aware by now, doesn't carry everything. This ain't like Verizon throttling California firefighters in the middle of a wildfire, but it might take more of this to get the public at large (and not just the few million Americans paying attention) to fight for what this President and his FCC have taken from us.
As our President takes over $120 million from emergency management funds and gives it to ICE, we learn that our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has spent nearly $120 million on office furniture. Priorities! To be absolutely fair and balanced, Fox News reported in early 2015 that the Obama DHS had spent $150 million on office furniture -- from 2010 to 2014, suggesting that this Administration is nearly twice as corrupt as the last one, and proving that when Democrats throw money at DHS, it doesn't impress right-wingers.
The state of Ohio plans to purge over 200,000, but is using a list riddled with thousands of errors. An "error," of course, is a voter on the list who hasn't died, hasn't moved, and has voted within the last six years; the problem with using lists like these -- you know, besides that they're obviously aimed at deregistering voters who tend to vote against the dominant political party in Ohio right now -- is that folks don't find out they've been deregistered until it's too late, because who asks themselves, self, am I still registered to vote, having done literally nothing to warrant deregistration?
Ho hum, ABC puts a panel on to discuss Medicare-for-All, using right-wing Republican Chris Christie and right-wing Democrat Rahm Emanuel for balance. Gosh, Wendell Potter or Timothy Faust not available that day? I mean, it's not like you just can't find people who'll make the case for Medicare-for-All -- even people who want to be on TV and get famous! -- though I'm sure you can't find as many elite cronies to do it. The good news? We're now past the "first they ignore you" and "then they ridicule you" phases of the debate into the "then they fight you." "Then you win" comes after that -- although, admittedly, it might take a while.
Finally, you've likely heard of the late Thomas Hofeller, the "master of modern gerrymandering," and the cache of files his daughter found after he passed? Well, Igor Derysh at Salon describes how Mr. Hofeller helped North Carolina gerrymander its districts specifically to dilute the black vote. Mr. Hofeller said, out loud, that he was trying to help "non-Hispanic whites," so it's hard to see how anyone could say this wasn't about race, especially after confronting his voluminous research on voters' racial makeup (and noting how the legislature split the largest historically black college in America into two Republican districts). The good news is that North Carolina's Supreme Court struck down that state's maps last week; now we hope our Supreme Court doesn't meddle (which it didn't in Pennsylvania).
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