Our Supreme Court tosses Wisconsin's state legislative district maps apparently because they believed that map applied the Voting Rights Act too stridently in delivering an additional Black-majority district. Possibly Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, who wrote the opinion supporting the map, spoke too precisely in saying "(w)e cannot say for certain on this record that seven majority-Black assembly districts are required" by the Voting Rights Act; you know John Roberts is an incurable literalist, and I guess the other five right-wing Justices are more than happy to indulge that if it suits their purposes. But I thought they were against stepping in this close to Election Day! Also too, why should Wisconsin's new maps resemble the previous ones as much as possible, as the state Supreme Court mandated? Those maps are terrible!
One veteran organizer calls Starbucks's anti-union efforts "the most intense (anti-union) campaign in modern U.S. history, and there’s really nothing in second place." Aside from the usual -- firing organizers, hiring dozens of new employees at a pro-union store to dilute the vote, disciplining workers for things no one had ever disciplined them for before, flying in managers to spy on workers, and calling "listening sessions" they dominate with anti-union talking points -- Starbucks stalls votes with endless appeals for district-wide (versus store-wide) votes, appeals they know will lose. They're also losing most of the votes, over 100 so far. I'm not sure bringing in former CEO Howard Schultz will help much; last we heard from him, he said so much stupid crap he killed his own Presidential campaign.
When I hear that "'Parental Bills of Rights' Are a Right-Wing Siege on Public Education,", all I can say is that right-wingers better watch their asses, lest these "bills of rights" get turned on them. Do they think Black and Brown parents won't say right-wingers are abridging their rights by forcibly effacing their history? Do they think the parents of trans kids will tolerate right-wing efforts to abridge their actual rights? Or do they imagine that only "the right" parents have "rights"? Remember, they're not rights if only some people have them. Great metaphor from Martha Kempner: "Every time (right-wingers) start to lose, they shake the snow globe and look at ways to generate outrage among their base."
Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that when our "liberal" media organs decry "cancel culture" and "wokeness," they're really upset that we now live in a world where readers have more power to respond to stories than they ever did before. Used to be you had "letters to the editor" that the editor himself curated; now anyone can just write a comment on a webpage, and no I never heard our "liberal" media wring their hands about shame and shunning in the old days. Shaming and shunning aren't "oppression" but merely the churn of civilization, and First Amendment protections don't run in only one direction at a time. (Hate to pile on, but I presume that Bari Weiss, who resigned saying Twitter had become the Times's "ultimate editor," had nothing to say about Matt Drudge being the Times's "ultimate editor" for about a decade.)
Marjorie Kohn at TruthOut says that Republican Senators acted the fool at the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings in order to "agitate their base" before the midterms, but I wonder how well that will work -- Republicans took a lot of anti-gay marriage and anti-flag burning votes in 2006, and you know how well that went for them in November. It'd be nice, though, if Democrats would, you know, offer something of value to voters before then, if for no other reason that the Republicans' hysterical arguments wouldn't be the only ones anyone made to the voters. Voters will choose "he said something" over "he said nothing" every time.
Finally, at least a dozen enterprising writers take a red pen to a New York Times article purporting to "explain" crypto, with hilarious results. Seriously, this article provides a good primer on the bad arguments propping up crypto, and note well, also, how often the Times writer resorts to the passive voice and the excessive prepositional phrase: "there are things of actual substance being built," he writes, never mind who's building them, and he could have said substantial things, too. And he might have said "crypto wealth and ideology is going to be a transformative force in our society in the coming years" better by saying crypto wealth and ideology will transform our society. By the time he begins a paragraph with "What I'm saying, I guess," he doesn't sound modest or colloquial; he sounds like a man worried that speaking plainly would expose him.
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