Uh oh: Tennessee Republicans propose a common law marriage bill between "one man" and "one woman," but forget to include age requirements, such that evil adults could force children into marriages when they're just 13. We know from the whole Roy Moore imbroglio from 2017 that this is a thing with the far right in America! Which reminds me that the QAnon conspiracy theory might also be projection. Let's not lose sight of the fact that this "common law marriage" excludes gays, and our Supreme Court might have something (more!) to say about that. (Hate to pile on, but the phrase "a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law" holds no meaning whatsoever, since no one forces you to gay-marry as part of the "current pathway.")
From Sarah Lazare at In These Times we learn "How Workers Used Amazon's Captive Audience Meetings Against the Company." Long story short: be ready to answer their anti-union propaganda! Long story somewhat longer: "Be() just as antagonistic to them as they're being to us" at captive anti-union meetings, then being super-polite (but no less fierce, there's a difference!) at future meetings, plus also plenty of "(w)e are not a 'third party,' we work here" and using the mere fact of captive meetings to organize. A moment perhaps too understated: "People would appreciate being able to sit down and not have to work, but at the same time they thought the meetings were bullshit." I'm sure after being worked like machines, many Amazon workers saw captive meetings more positively merely because their bosses weren't grinding them into dirt for a short time.
When you hear that Republicans are converting Democratic voters at four times the rate Democrats are converting Republican ones in Pennsylvania, you have to remember that this statement would be true if Republicans literally converted four voters and Democrats converted one. The article tells a bunch of stories about hard hats pissed off about inflation and crime, but doesn't present that factoid in any sort of useful context until paragraph nine, when we learn that registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans, 4 million to 3.4 million, though we still don't learn how many voters chose no party affiliation, or third-party affiliation). And not until paragraph 14 do we get any hard numbers -- 1,315 Democrats have crossed over in Philadelphia. Out of how many total registered voters in Philadelphia? Over 1.1 million. Verdict: bad argument.
Ho hum, a former White House adviser now running for a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire voted in Presidential primaries in two separate states in 2016, which almost certainly violates federal law. "But I lived here in January and voted, so why can't I vote again when I moved here in June now that my candidate is out of the race?" should invite only one answer: one person, one vote. Republicans whine about "voter fraud" whenever they don't annihilate their opponents in elections anymore, and yet they're the only ones we ever seem to catch doing it. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.
When I confront the question of how we should read great Russian writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the context of Russia's war on Ukraine, I must confess it had never once occurred to me that we shouldn't read them -- their work, like that of Anton Chekhov, predates the soul-destroying reign of Josef Stalin, and no one should presume they're "uncivilized" merely because Vlad the Bad is profoundly uncivilized. Indeed, I would argue that the only folks who think so either have never read these authors (Anna Karenina, for the record, is every bit as great as its devotees say it is) or feel so helpless in the face of horror that they would think almost anything to regain the mere illusion of control. Also, Messrs. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky know more about war than Vlad the Bad will ever know about anything.
Finally, despite Republicans' best efforts, our Senate confirms D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to our Supreme Court, by a disturbingly narrow vote of 53-47. Anyone else see a problem with the following paragraph? "Multiple Republicans, including Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Josh Hawley of Missouri, accused the judge of being lenient toward child sexual abusers. Fact-checkers say that the claims are misleading and that Jackson's sentencing decisions were in line with her peers on the federal bench." Give yourself a gold star if you think we should demand that journalists check the facts, instead of having "fact-checkers" do it.
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