Saturday, July 28th, 2018
Stephan: Yesterday I ran a story on voting and, today, here's another one covering another aspect. The Republican Party aided by the Russians, yes, they are still at it, look at Senator Claire Mccaskill's situation, are doing their best to rig the 2018 election, and they are doing it in front of our eyes. Meanwhile we are playing video games and watching sports; American democracy is in a state of extreme fragility.
Credit: Marc Piscotty/Getty
“Things have changed dramatically,” wrote Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision. He was referring to what he saw as a reduction in racial discrimination in the South and a rise in black residents’ access to voting since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The election of the first black president and higher rates of black voting since 1965 were reason enough for him and four other justices to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. It was a key provision that required Southern states with a history of voter discrimination to clear any changes to their voting laws with the federal government, under a process called preclearance.
However, according to “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the optimism shown in the Shelby County v. Holder decision hasn’t been borne out. This is especially true when it comes to voter purging, the process by which […]
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Saturday, July 28th, 2018
Kevin Mathews, - truthout
Stephan: After walking a thousand miles, arriving in the U.S. seeking asylum we kidnap these poor refugee children, ripping them away from their parents. Then a small group of companies begin sucking the families dry of any money they might still have after fleeing their countries in fear of their lives.
When I was a boy studying history with Mr. Pattison in the eighth grade I asked him what kind of people would work in a concentration camp? His answer was, "ordinary people too frightened, complicit, or weak to say no." I could not get my head around that answer but watching Americans behave like the Gestapo I think I get it now. He was right,"ordinary people too frightened, complicit, or weak to say no." $8 a minute to make a call. Scumbaggery at a level that should be a national embarrassment but, instead, is just business as usual.
If your phone carrier charged you $8 per minute to speak on the phone, you’d immediately cancel that plan and look for a more reasonable offer. The one exception might be if your children were being held captive and only one service provider allowed you to communicate, you’d pay whatever is necessary to have a conversation with them.
Go figure that the diabolical Trump administration has decided to exploit a situation like that. Callous federal policy has resulted in thousands of migrant families being separated at the border, and now BuzzFeed Newsreports that the government is milking them for extra cash if they want to occasionally keep in touch.
The White House created this problem by instituting a “zero tolerance” approach to immigration and tearing kids and parents apart in an attempt to deter other would-be migrants from coming to the United States. It then exacerbated the problem by developing no logistical system for reuniting the families. That’s not just zero tolerance, that’s zero thought and zero heart.
As a result, the government is still trying to figure out how to return kids to their parents, and has had to receive extensions to make that happen. At the very least, in the […]
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