As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
What a depraved, fascist moron would do:
At the risk of counting chickens before they're hatched, David Faris explains why the Democrats' first priority is to fix the election system in this country:
If Joe Biden and the Democrats somehow manage to navigate this morass of voter suppression, election violence, and ominous threats and capture the presidency, the Senate, and the House this week, they must move quickly and decisively to democratize a country that is rapidly sliding into competitive authoritarianism. The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution unambiguously grants Congress the authority to exert its authority over this archipelago of hateful, extra-judicial election rigging.
And that is what they must do. Outlaw racist voter ID laws. Require ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted. Mandate that states tie the number of polling places to population targets. Re-enfranchise every formerly incarcerated person in the country, whatever the racists in state government say. Clean up the ridiculous ambiguity over the rules of the Electoral College while we wait for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to become law in enough states to end this madness forever. Enact sweeping new criminal penalties for voter suppression activities. Register every American to vote automatically when they turn 18 (or better yet, lower the voting age to 16). Refuse to admit members of Congress who won their seats through blatantly lawless voter suppression. Deploy force against states that refuse to comply.
Apologize for nothing.
Even if this isn't the absolute first priority, it has to be near the top.
Be confident, but take nothing for granted:
As a reminder, the final national polls in 2016 picked up the collapse in Hillary's lead and were very close to the actual final margin. https://t.co/dVAPbWO3dN
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 31, 2020
There's an excellent chance President Trump is headed for the biggest repudiation of a first-term president since Jimmy Carter in 1980 (9.7%) and an outside chance he's headed for the biggest since Herbert Hoover in 1932 (17.7%).
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 1, 2020
Kudos to all who are foiling Republican voter suppression efforts by making the decision to vote:
... In a year when the act of voting felt more precarious than ever, more than 94 million had voted in the 2020 election by Monday, casting their ballots early or by mail in record numbers in virtually every state in the nation. Tens of millions more will don masks, and in many places warm clothes, to vote the old-fashioned way — in person, on Election Day. They’ll do it despite — and in many cases, because of — the isolation and obstacles of this unusual year.
Those who have voted have lost jobs or loved ones to the pandemic or have battled the coronavirus themselves. They have withstood rain and heat and lines that lasted from morning until dark to register their electoral choices, risked exposure to the virus and navigated dizzying rule changes about signature requirements and drop boxes and ballot envelopes. They have been inundated with unsubstantiated attacks by President Trump on the integrity of the election.
They were helped by the unseen labor of thousands of state and county election administrators, some of them stumbling through messy primaries but then rallying to get ready for November, gearing up for massive demand for mail and in-person voting with rush orders of envelopes and high-speed scanners and backup rosters of election workers.
None of that felt inevitable at the start of the year, when the arrival of the pandemic collided with the first primaries of the 2020 campaign. Acute shortages of poll workers forced election officials to shutter many voting locations. Voting rules were changed to accommodate the health crisis, only to be overturned by the courts. States that had previously handled a trickle of mail voting suddenly faced a deluge.
And yet, they persisted.
Infidel 753 posted "The Choice" twice, most recently back on September 14. The whole post is worth reading, especially if you're still in an "undecided" mode (really?), but we're just excerpting a portion to give you a flavor:
This post is addressed to those who, for whatever reason, don't like Biden. Maybe you consider him too centrist or too old or too old-fashioned or "Republican-lite" or whatever... Maybe you think the process by which millions of rank-and-file Democrats chose the nominee (from among a remarkably large and varied group of candidates) was tainted in some way. Maybe you hold that your vote has to be earned and Biden hasn't done this or that thing that qualifies him as having done so.
None of that is a good enough reason to let Trump be re-elected.
None of that is a good enough reason to let him saddle the whole country with a 7-2 majority of reactionaries and theocrats on the Supreme Court for decades to come.
None of that is a good enough reason to risk four more years of migrant family separation and kids in cages, or of rhetoric which blatantly scapegoats Latinos, Muslims, and whatever other minority makes a convenient target.
None of that is a good enough reason to leave this vicious and hateful man in a position where he could block laws to help the unemployed and the uninsured, laws to end gerrymandering and vote suppression, laws to protect gay equality and the right to abortion nationally, that a Democratic House and Senate might pass.
None of that is a good enough reason to tolerate four more years of the massive and flagrant banana-republic corruption we've seen.
None of that is a good enough reason to risk four more years of budget-wrecking giant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, and efforts to sabotage Social Security, the Postal Service, and the Devil knows what else.
None of that is a good enough reason to facilitate four more years of bungling the response to covid-19 (yes, it will still be around long after January 2021).
You should also check out Infidel's link round- up, which we recommend every week because, well, you can't do any better!
