America’s Last Journalist, Greg Palast, in discussing the Dominion/Fox suit, reveals the “unspoken but horribly disturbing split growing between some White and Black activists.” Long story short: White activists talk about mostly about voting machine hacking, which could happen but almost certainly hasn’t happened, while Black activists talk about vote suppression, which most certainly does happen – and which we White folks don’t fear because we don’t typically get forced to fill out provisional ballots or get purged by Interstate Crosscheck or get “Souls to the Polls” early voting banned. Everywhere you go, the problem isn’t “changing” votes but simply not counting them.
Here’s a major downside to the Dominion/Fox news settlement: Fox may be able to write over a quarter of that settlement off on their taxes. Even though Fox noted, in its carefully-worded statement, that it did broadcast lies, our IRS has ruled in the past that settlements are just the “ordinary and necessary” cost of doing business, which tells us what a sick, immoral, and decadent civilization we are, to let big corporations do wrong and then get a tax break for it. Anyway, if our IRS changes their minds, they at least have the funding to go after Fox, which is presumably why Congressional Republicans have been so hot to repeal that funding increase.
The three major credit reporting corporations have decided to remove medical debt under $500 from credit reports, under pressure from our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB), and though they should also omit larger amounts of medical debt, since accumulating medical debt has virtually nothing to do with a person’s ability to be responsible, I feel compelled to point out that Donald Trump’s CFPB didn’t lift a finger to help anyone with their medical debt. The Trump CFPB wanted to be a “partner” to financial predators! Partnering with the American people clearly never crossed their minds.
By a large and actually bipartisan margin, Colorado’s government has passed the nation’s first state-level “right to repair” law for farmers. Naturally a John Deere spokeshack says that though of course John Deere supports the right to repair, this law will have (wait for it!) “unintended consequences.” Another manufacture specifically mentions “overriding emissions controls,” as if the first thing a farmer will do with his thresher is make sure it pollutes more, and anyway the law prevents farmers from doing that. Once again, everyone’s on the right side of history but the corporations.
Finally, when you hear that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) actually criticized President Biden for not meeting with House Speaker McCarthy over the debt limit, you must remember a few things: 1) Joe Manchin thinks Bipartisan Happy Fun Time Land is a real place, and 2) in America, we prefer our leaders decisive, and refusing to pander to Republican hostage-taking over the debt is decisive. Seriously, “we are long past time for our elected leaders to sit down and discuss how to solve this impending debt ceiling crisis”? There’s one way to end this “crisis,” and that’s for President Biden to stand his ground – the same ground where we’re standing, not incidentally – and for Speaker McCarthy and his band of drama hounds to capitulate.