"480 Minutes" - Voter Suppression
There are more than 250 Republican-sponsored voter suppression bills making their way through state legislatures nationwide at the moment. One such bill is being discussed at the Supreme Court this week where the Republican lawyer flat out admitted that expanding the vote is disadvantageous to Republicans.
Not long ago Fox News used the argument that the "'general tenor' of the [The Tucker Carlson S]how should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary'" as a defense in court. Their defense: Tucker can't be held accountable for his words because no one in their right mind would take him seriously, and, in front of a #Cheeto-appointed judge, they won their case. The GOP has now admitted to the Supreme Court that democracy is bad for Republicans. We'll see how that argument lands.
In other news the governor of Texas, along with governors of other red states have decided to remove all COVID-mitigating restrictions including mask mandates and fully re-open businesses. The Texas move is meant to distract from the fact that Republican energy policies over the past 20+ years are responsible for the tragedy that occurred there last month when the power grid failed. Texas has similar weather-related grid outages in 1999 and 2011. After those events recommendations were made to winterize and otherwise shore up the grid, but the regulation-lite state didn't listen. As a result last month 80+ people died and untold damage was done to homes and countless people were forced to huddle indoors for heat together with a deadly airborne virus floating around.
At first the governor of Texas tried to blame renewable power sources for the grid failure but has since been forced to admit that the failures were across the board (because, you know reality).
Now the governor is blaming the recent spike in Texas COVID cases on immigrants let into the country by the Biden Administration. This argument is total bad faith bunk...but let's take a flight of fancy, say that he's right, and reason our way through the logic of his decision. In stating that immigrants are causing a spike in cases the governor is admitting that there is indeed a spike in cases. Lifting mitigation efforts when cases are spiking is indefensible.
Of course, besides the distraction that this obvious lunacy offers, the fact is the decision will disproportionately affect front-line workers, the majority of which are people of color who tend to not vote for Republicans, so...yeah, a strategy that results in the deaths of more people of color than white people is a win-win for the GOP. Cynical? Maybe at some point in history, but no longer. Now it's just the devastatingly sad obvious reality of our political moment here in the U.S.
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We will debut new music today from Adult Mom (Purchase, NY, @AdultMomBand), Billy Nomates (Bristol, England, @_billy_nomates), Julien Baker (Memphis, TN, @JulienRBaker), Shame (London, England, @ShameBandUK), and Spirit Award (Seattle, WA, @AwardSpirit).
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