Category: Politics
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If you’re like me, you spend too much time – way too much time – these days looking at polling data. I ran across some interesting remarks by Foucault on opinion yesterday, which I’ll share here as a technique of distraction. He makes them in the context of a 1976 conversation with J. P. Barou…
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That's right, the party of flag and God and country found something more important to do today than remembering 9/11: making sure that poor North Carolinians don't get health insurance. The current state budget does not include Medicaid expansion because the GOP so hates Obama that insuring 600,000+ people and creating 30,000+ jobs in the…
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The awful NC legislature, largely the product of breathtakingly effective partisan gerrymandering, may finally be about to get more competitive. A lower Court in NC just unanimously ruled that the GOP maps violated the state constitution (which keeps it out of federal courts), and the state GOP apparently does not plan to appeal (virtually all…
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North Carolina took a small step today towards undoing its disgraceful HB2 legislation passed by the state’s Republican legislature back in 2016 as an effort to stop Charlotte’s attempt to allow trans people to use the bathroom matching their gender identity. Per a consent decree today, the state has agreed that no provision in HB2’s…
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The Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is a farce attempting to be a tragedy. The initial claim – that the question was needed to enforce the Voting rights Act – was so obviously pretextual that Justice Roberts had to join the Court’s liberals to strike it down (even…
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Yesterday was a big news day. The biggest story was probably our Tinpot Dictator’s decision to unilaterally violate the Iranian nuclear deal. In addition to alienating almost everyone not named Bibi Netanyahu or John Bolton, and making the world less safe, the main thing this proves is that Trump can’t see more than ten minutes…
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I live in North Carolina, the state legislature for which has been basically bought by Art Pope, a smaller-scale Koch brother (the Koch brothers themselves, meanwhile, have been successfully buying the federal government). The NC legislature has done some truly staggering things, so I’m pretty jaded on the topic of what state legislatures can do. …
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By Gordon Hull As part of its war on all things done during the Obama administration, the Trump administration is planning to do away with Net Neutrality rules. Those rules, announced in early 2015, established that Internet Service Providers must treat all traffic across their networks equally. Absent such rules, they could favor their own…
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By Gordon Hull Facebook’s opaque advertising practices are in the news (again) because it was apparently the vehicle through which some of the Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 election were routed. This piece by Sam Biddle on The Intercept is well worth the read, as it makes the case that the public needs…
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By Gordon Hull As our tin-pot “President” continues his inexorable slide into narcissistic authoritarianism, it is worth noting recent events that establish beyond any residual doubt that radical white terrorism is now official policy. When historians look at the Trump presidency, assuming we all survive long enough for there to be historians, I suspect last…
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