America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, tells the story of how the state of Georgia just threw out thousands of Korean-American voting registrations and arrested the lawyer who organized them. Thus we are reminded that the state of Georgia is an equal-opportunity vote suppressor, except, of course, of white votes. And thus we are also reminded that when Mitch McConnell calls the For the People Act "a solution in search of a problem," that one of the many problems is a state that just throws out folks of color's voter registrations whenever it pleases.
FactCheck.org helps you navigate the thicket of yelling and ranting about the recent surge of immigration at the border. It's all our "liberal" media want to talk about, apparently, but long story short, via a Rice University researcher: "The patterns of migration do not seem to correlate to any specific U.S. immigration policy. The numbers seem to go up and down on a logic of their own." And note well that border apprehensions were five times higher in 2000 than in 2020, when we seem to wring our hands about it a lot more now than we did then. Needless to say, you won't like hearing any of that if you're determined to fight on one side or the other.
Baltimore stops prosecuting minor offenses because of the pandemic, and after crime goes down dramatically, the city will stop prosecuting these minor offenses permanently. Moreover, the city will work with local behavioral health workers to redirect sex workers, drug users, and mental illness sufferers to get help, and redirect the savings from making all those minor drug and prostitution arrests to attack actually violent crime. Could Democrats maybe advance this narrative, which is not as counterintuitive as the consultant class would want us to think? Nah -- these are Democrats we're talking about.
Nevada state legislators advance a bill aiming to crack down on police use of force. Restricting violent responses at protests is necessary, and retraining police and requiring more reporting will do some good, but we'll still have to solve the basic problem: that we route the vast majority of citizens' requests for assistance from the state through our police, when no one has the flexibility of mind to deal with the sheer variety (let alone volume) of requests. Best to make our police serve warrants and make arrests, and stop asking so much more of them.
Finally, from Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept we learn that Amazon knew its delivery drivers were using pee bottles on their routes, to wit: "the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas that managers frequently referenced it during meetings and in formal policy documents and emails." And not just pee bottles, but bags, for guess what. Naturally if you leave pee bottles or poop bags in vans, Amazon disciplines you, and not that you should leave your leavings lying around, but Jesus Mary and Joseph would it kill Amazon to hire more workers so it doesn't work the ones it has to the point where they do their business in their van and then forget to get rid of it?
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