StrangeSox

The NC GOP, which had their last voter suppression attempt via Voter ID struck down because they explicitly targeted minority voters, is trying to push through a constitutional amendment to require Voter ID. It's vague and leaves a whole lot to be worked out, but the goal is to pass it this way so that the Democratic majority state supreme court can't rule it unconstitutional. We don't need to ignore the years-long pattern of voter suppression efforts by the GOP when we look at the latest one. http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article212943754.html

You could read the amici briefs or the dissents for detailed information on why it actually is harmful. Again, already 2M purged. illini also laid out some of the issues with the route they chose. And there's no real assumption here about the purpose. Look who did it, look at the impact, look at the lack of necessity for the rule. Here's a pretty clear distinction: there is some minimum of things necessary to ensure fair and accurate elections. I would agree that a voter registration roll is one of those things. You can call it a barrier, sure, but it's one that is necessary. Contrarily, purging voters from rolls, which can restrict or eliminate their ability to vote in a given election, is not as necessary. Yes, you want to keep reasonably accurate roles for a variety of reasons, but there was no serious electoral challenges faced in Ohio that necessitated mass purging of their rolls. So barrier that are kept as minimal as possible (motor voter, automatic registration, etc.) are good, barriers that are erected by partisans for partisan reasons are bad (basically all GOP electoral changes, from voter ID to voter purges to restricting voting times and places). It's not a hard distinction to make, and it's not some sort of logic trap. If you agree with the necessity of voter registration rolls, it doesn't mean that you have to accept every other possible barrier to voting or attempts to purge voter rolls.

It's a rule instituted by Republicans, cheered on and supported by other Republicans, that has resulted in a 2:1 ratio in who's been purged, favoring Republicans. You can't separate that out from the rule change, which is completely unnecessary and, despite the hacks on the SC saying otherwise, not even legal. It's the reason they undertook the rule change. "If you think this naked partisan electoral suppression is bad, you think literally all requirements for voting are bad" doesn't actually follow.

Same-day easy voter registration on top of automatic voter registration for everyone else should be the goal. Setting that aside, moving from the status quo to a change that makes voting or voting registration even more difficult is deliberate voter suppression. That is what you keep ignoring, that this is a deliberate electoral tactic by the GOP to disenfranchise people not likely to vote for them. Ohio's removed 2 million people from the rolls already. What you're arguing, that this isn't a deliberate barrier to prevent as many non-GOP voters from voting, isn't really based on anything at all. Various conservative groups that sue states to force voter roll purges were already cheering the decision and announcing plans to push for more of these measures nationally, just like they were after the last major baseless voter suppression ruling, Shelby County. There's no separating out the argument that the measures taken by Ohio here, or the new Voter ID garbage NC is trying to pass, or all of the voter suppression efforts taken in the wake of Shelby County, are completely unnecessary for electoral integrity. The sole purpose of those efforts is voter suppression by conservatives.

They seemed to have made their point with their nuclear and missile tests and got everyone else to come to the table with them? They've done this same cycle numerous times. Trump hates any sort of criticism, which our allies are willing to offer, and laps up any praise directed his way, which Kim was willing to offer. Plus I expect an announcement of Trump Tower--Pyongyang within the next two years.

Trump openly called it a "win" last night. It's voter suppression by the GOP, full stop. The arguments that any of their voter suppression tactics are actually necessary to address real concerns or issues are not based on any real-world evidence. On the other side, we have evidence of large numbers of disenfranchised voters, more than enough to change electoral outcomes. It's election fraud by other means.

What shift? He just got a lot of what he wanted while not really giving up or committing to anything.

good lord e: the good outcome of these talks so far is that Trump and Kim are now best friends, which has to decrease the likelihood of war breaking out.

Lol

There's a reason why the GOP undertakes these efforts again and again and again, and it sure as hell isn't because it creates a meaningless hurdle.

greg, I thought you were all anti-PC and loved guys who "tell it like it is"?

A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, b****’ The president believes that the United States owes nothing to anyone—especially its allies. https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/562511/?__twitter_impression=true Many of Donald Trump’s critics find it difficult to ascribe to a president they consider to be both subliterate and historically insensate a foreign-policy doctrine that approaches coherence. A Trump Doctrine would require evidence of Trump Thought, and proof of such thinking, the argument goes, is scant. This view is informed in part by feelings of condescension, but it is not meritless. Barack Obama, whose foreign-policy doctrine I studied in depth, was cerebral to a fault; the man who succeeded him is perhaps the most glandular president in American history. Unlike Obama, Trump possesses no ability to explain anything resembling a foreign-policy philosophy. But this does not mean that he is without ideas. Over the past couple of months, I’ve asked a number of people close to the president to provide me with short descriptions of what might constitute the Trump Doctrine. I’ve been trying, as part of a larger project, to understand the revolutionary nature of Trump’s approach to world affairs. This task became even more interesting over the weekend, when Trump made his most ambitious move yet to dismantle the U.S.-led Western alliance; it becomes more interesting still as Trump launches, without preparation or baseline knowledge, a complicated nuclear negotiation with a fanatical and bizarre regime that quite possibly has his number. Trumpian chaos is, in fact, undergirded by a comprehensible worldview, a number of experts have insisted. The Brookings Institution scholar (and frequent Atlantic contributor) Thomas Wright argued in a January 2016 essay that Trump’s views are both discernible and explicable. Wright, who published his analysis at a time when most everyone in the foreign-policy establishment considered Trump’s candidacy to be a farce, wrote that Trump loathes the liberal international order and would work against it as president; he wrote that Trump also dislikes America’s military alliances, and would work against them; he argued that Trump believes in his bones that the global economy is unfair to the U.S.; and, finally, he wrote that Trump has an innate sympathy for “authoritarian strongmen.” Wright was prophetic. Trump’s actions these past weeks, and my conversations with administration officials and friends and associates of Trump, suggest that the president will be acting on his beliefs in a more urgent, and focused, way than he did in the first year of his presidency, and that the pace of potentially cataclysmic disruption will quicken in the coming days. And so, understanding Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine is more urgent than ever. The third-best encapsulation of the Trump Doctrine, as outlined by a senior administration official over lunch a few weeks ago, is this: “No Friends, No Enemies.” This official explained that he was not describing a variant of the realpolitik notion that the U.S. has only shifting alliances, not permanent friends. Trump, this official said, doesn’t believe that the U.S. should be part of any alliance at all. “We have to explain to him that countries that have worked with us together in the past expect a level of loyalty from us, but he doesn’t believe that this should factor into the equation,” the official said. The second-best self-description of the Trump Doctrine I heard was this, from a senior national-security official: “Permanent destabilization creates American advantage.” The official who described this to me said Trump believes that keeping allies and adversaries alike perpetually off-balance necessarily benefits the United States, which is still the most powerful country on Earth. When I noted that America’s adversaries seem far less destabilized by Trump than do America’s allies, this official argued for strategic patience. “They’ll see over time that it doesn’t pay to argue with us.” The best distillation of the Trump Doctrine I heard, though, came from a senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking. I was talking to this person several weeks ago, and I said, by way of introduction, that I thought it might perhaps be too early to discern a definitive Trump Doctrine. “No,” the official said. “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.” “What is it?” I asked. Here is the answer I received: “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, b****.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.” It struck me almost immediately that this was the most acute, and attitudinally honest, description of the manner in which members of Trump’s team, and Trump himself, understand their role in the world. I asked this official to explain the idea. “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” President Trump, this official said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” I later asked another senior official, one who rendered the doctrine not as “We’re America, b****” but as “We’re America, b****es,” whether he was aware of the 2004 movie Team America: World Police, whose theme song (YT: Team America: World Police - America (Fuck Yeah)) was “America, Fuck Yeah!” “Of course,” he said, laughing. “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.” “We’re America, b****” is not only a characterologically accurate collective self-appraisal—the gangster fronting, the casual misogyny, the insupportable confidence—but it is also perfectly Rorschachian. To Trump’s followers, “We’re America, b****” could be understood as a middle finger directed at a cold and unfair world, one that no longer respects American power and privilege. To much of the world, however, and certainly to most practitioners of foreign and national-security policy, “We’re America, b****” would be understood as self-isolating, and self-sabotaging. I’m not arguing that the attitude underlying “We’re America, b****” is without any utility. There are occasions—the 1979 Iran hostage crisis comes to mind—in which a blunt posture would have been useful, or at least ephemerally satisfying. President Obama himself expressed displeasure—in a rhetorically controlled way—at the failure of American allies to pay what he viewed as their fair share of common defense costs. And I don’t want to suggest that there is no place for self-confidence in foreign policymaking. The Iran nuclear deal was imperfect in part because the Obama administration seemed, at times, to let Iran drive the process. One day the Trump administration may have a lasting foreign-policy victory of some sort. It is likely that the North Korea summit will end, if not disastrously, then inconclusively. But there is a slight chance that it could mark the start of a useful round of negotiations. And I’m not one to mock Jared Kushner for his role in the Middle East peace process. There is virtually no chance of the process succeeding, but the great experts have all tried and failed, so why shouldn’t the president’s son-in-law give it a shot? But what is mainly interesting about “We’re America, b****” is its delusional quality. Donald Trump is pursuing policies that undermine the Western alliance, empower Russia and China, and demoralize freedom-seeking people around the world. The United States could be made weaker—perhaps permanently—by the implementation of the Trump Doctrine. The administration officials, and friends of Trump, I’ve spoken with in recent days believe the opposite: that Trump is rebuilding American power after an eight-year period of willful dissipation. “People criticize [Trump] for being opposed to everything Obama did, but we’re justified in canceling out his policies,” one friend of Trump’s told me. This friend described the Trump Doctrine in the simplest way possible. “There’s the Obama Doctrine, and the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine,” he said. “We’re the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine.”

In-person voter fraud continues to remain essentially non-existent. It is not a real problem that needs addressing in this country, and we sure don't need to disenfranchise tens or hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters to address a problem that doesn't exist. It's voter suppression. That's why the GOP does it. Sometimes they let the mask slip and make it a little too obvious, but that's the underlying reason again and again.

Ohio's already purged 2 million since 2011, more than any other state. This is carried out by GOP operatives to suppress the vote, which favors the GOP. facially neutral voter restrictions that have wildly disparate racial impact have a long and bad history in this country, jenks. "what's so hard about a literacy test?" "can you really not afford that small poll tax?"

Weird how twice as many people in Democratic areas compared to Republican areas get purged from the roles. You can read Sotomayor's dissent wherein she lays out the history of this sort of voter suppression tactics. Failing to vote FOR FOUR YEARS isn't that big of a window and you shouldn't lose your ability to vote and have to jump through hurdles to get it back because you weren't interested in 1-2 Presidential elections. It's just another one of the GOP's efforts to maintain power and control while only have a shrinking minority of voters. The damage they're going to be doing in the courts will last a generation, which is why the Democrats need to aggressively combat it. You can keep insisting that it's "laughable" that it's considered a voting barrier, but there's a reason why the GOP aggressively pursues voter suppression everywhere they can.

The Motor Voter Act is pretty explicit about this, but the Republican partisans on the court have never let explicitly clear voter protection/rights language get in their way of signing off on GOP-friendly voter suppression in the past (looking at you, Shelby County). Democrats need to pack the court with half a dozen other justices or we're going to face decades of illegitimate conservative dogma destroying any chance at progress. should also consider removing Gorsuch's illegitimate seat and issuing reversals of all rulings in which his vote was necessary to form a majority. McConnell started this game of hardball, Dems need to be willing to finish it.

SCOTUS rules GOP voter suppression measures in Ohio are okay along partisan lines, Alito writing the opinion. Republicans' constant voter suppression efforts need to be attacked strongly wherever Democrats get power.

Yeah. He seemed like a genuinely good person, or at least someone who tried to be and recognized his own shortcomings. His shows and his writing were as much social commentary as they were about food. e.g.: He was in Beruit filming when war broke out there, too. He cooked meals for the scared hotel staff. Plus he had a burning hatred for Kissinger, which is always a big plus.

Anthony Bourdain, 61, apparent suicide Suicide rates are rising fast across the country. If you need help, please seek it.

Can't get your policies through fair democratic elections, or even through Congress despite unfair elections? Turn next to the courts you spent years blocking the previous administration from staffing!

Really, really bad

Texas is asking the courts to enjoin the entire ACA, and the department of Justice is now refusing to defend the law.