Ari has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. All that to say, he’s an expert on election subversion, and more importantly, what can be done about it. You can learn more about Ari’s work on his website.
We know that there is a new face to voter suppression and election interference in 2024. Republicans are making it harder for people who they think will vote for the Democrats to vote. What does that look like, and what can we do about it? That’s the topic that is up for discussion tonight.
The election is getting close. Some of the first ballots will go out this Saturday to members of the military and Americans abroad. It’s time to arm ourselves with the best information, and Ari is one of the essential people for us to have that conversation with.
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As Rep. Bill Pascrell pointed out, there's a good case to be made via Section III of the 14th Amendment.
ri Berman, the relentless defender of the franchise against all enemies foreign and domestic, has been suggesting on the electric Twitter machine that none of the 126 Republicans who have signed onto the Covenant of Sedition should be seated when the new Congress opens in January. This I find intriguing because, after all, this whole election was corrupt because people said mean things to other people. Rep. Bill Pascrell, whose pursuit of the president*'s tax returns has been dogged, does Berman one better. He would refuse to seat them based on Section III of the 14th Amendment. It reads as follows:
Down with the traitor, up with the star!
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click:"Sweet Emma"(James Andrews): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1964,is New York Governor Nelson Rockefellertrying to get the Republican National Convention to repudiate the John Birch Society and failing, miserably, as the ur-wingnuts go crazy. (Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke has a cameo.) And...it begins. History is so cool.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Friday told Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to submit his resignation if the agency does not clear the nation’s firstcoronavirusvaccine by day’s end, according to people familiar with the situation...The threat came on the same day that President Trump tweeted that the FDA is “a big, old, slow turtle” in its handling of vaccines, while exhorting Commissioner Stephen Hahn to “get the dam vaccines out NOW.” He added: “Stop playing games and start saving lives!!!” It also led the FDA to accelerate its timetable for clearing America’s first vaccine from Saturday morning to later Friday, according to two people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
Can't we convince him that we've already had his parade and he missed it while he was in the hospital?
Is it a good day for dinosaur news,Irish Times? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Since their discovery, palaeontologists had long suspected that they were of dinosaur origin but now dinosaur experts have finally identified them as such. “People knew about them but they had never been formally described. Now it’s official. We know what these dinosaurs are,” says DrMike Simms, a curator and palaeontologist atNational MuseumsNorthern Irelandand lead author on the study...By looking at details of the internal structure, shape and surface texture of the bone fragments, they were able to confirm that two of the specimens are indeed dinosaur bones – a first for Ireland – and that they belonged to two completely different dinosaurs.
It is completely amazing to me that the Motherland was dino-free for this long. TheITmakes the expected joke about St. Patrick, but I regret bitterly that this discovery came far too late for Father Ted to have made an episode out of it.
The “great rarity” of Irish dinosaur fossils is in fact due to most of Ireland’s rocks being “the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young”, says Simms. Rocks of the correct age have been eroded away or covered up by other rock layers. Even where rocks of the right age are preserved, he explains, they were deposited in ancient seas or deserts and would not normally contain dinosaur remains because these animals mainly lived on land. We are “extraordinarily lucky” to have found these, he says. The bones, taken to have been eroded out of marine rocks nearby, raise questions about the dinosaurs’ diet and death. The two dinosaurs “were perhaps swept out to sea, alive or dead, sinking to the Jurassic sea bed where they were buried and fossilised”, he says.
No matter, even in Ireland, they lived then to give us greatcraicnow.
I'll be back on Monday to analyze theamicusbriefs in support of the Texas lawsuit that will have been filed over the weekend by the residents of Vulcan, Eminiar 7, Talos IV, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and wear the damn mask.
This week on CounterSpin: From targeted "voter ID" laws to purging people from the rolls to fighting vote by mail, Republicans are making ever-bolder attempts to suppress voting—expanding the franchise doesn't work in their favor, Donald Trump unabashedly stated recently. It's a patently anti-democratic project by definition, but corporate media's business-as-usual, partisan framing reduces a struggle over a fundament of societal participation to jockeying between elephants and donkeys. It's a failure of the greatest magnitude, and no amount of ponderous, prize-winning books written in the aftermath will substitute for tough reporting done now to protect the integrity of the vote going into one of the most monumental presidential elections in the country's history. We'll talk about that with Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, and a senior reporter on the voting rights beat at Mother Jones.