A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Texas' voter suppression bills are fueled by millions in corporate cash
https://popular.info/p/texas-voter-suppression-bills-are?token=eyJ1c2V
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Texas already has the most restrictive voting laws in the country. But with the state trending blue, Governor Greg Abbott (R) and Republicans in the Texas legislature are pushing a series of draconian bills that would make it even harder for Texans to cast a ballot. An investigation by Popular Information reveals that the elected officials in Texas advocating for these voter suppression measures are backed by millions from corporations that purport to support voting rights.
The Brennan Center has identified a dozen bills introduced in the Texas legislature to restrict voting. But omnibus voting legislation in the Senate (SB 7) and House (HB 6) have the most traction. These are expansive, complex bills that would limit voting in a variety of ways.
Texas does not have no-excuse absentee voting and did not even allow it last year during the pandemic. SB 7 would create additional hurdles for voters in future elections seeking to vote absentee due to a disability. These voters would need to submit either: (1) Documentation of their disability from the Social Security Administration or the Department of Veterans Affairs, or (2) Certification of their disability on a form completed by a licensed physician, chiropractor, or Christian Scientist. Under SB 7, local election officials would be prohibited from mailing an absentee ballot application to anyone who doesn't explicitly request it. The bill also bans the use of drop boxes to return absentee ballots.
Notably, SB 7 would also require all countywide polling places to have approximately the same number of machines. Why is this important? It would effectively prohibit the use of sports arenas as mega-voting locations. Last year the arenas for the San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks, and Houston Rockets were all used for voting.
SB 7 would prohibit mobile, outdoor, and drive-through polling locations. Last year Republicans unsuccessfully sued to invalidate 127,000 votes cast in drive-thru polling locations. The bill would guarantee that poll watchers have "free movement" inside of polling locations and end the prohibition on poll watchers filming voters, including inside of a voting station. Anyone who "obstructs" a poll watcher could be charged with a crime. Combined, these measures are a recipe for voter intimidation.
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If you can't win with your ideas, cheat. The Republican way.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:Funny, mail-in voting was used more by Republicans than Democrats before 2020. They didn't mind it then, since, as all the evidence shows, there is no fraud.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
No they don't.
Do not conflate absentee ballots with mail-in ballots. They only sound the same if you're an easily manipulated idiot.
Get rid of absentee ballots too except for people serving overseas in the military and people who are tied to their bed in a hospital or on hospice.
I've always said that of absentee ballots.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:Funny, mail-in voting was used more by Republicans than Democrats before 2020. They didn't mind it then, since, as all the evidence shows, there is no fraud.
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Do not conflate absentee ballots with mail-in ballots. They only sound the same if you're an easily manipulated idiot.
Get rid of absentee ballots too except for people serving overseas in the military and people who are tied to their bed in a hospital or on hospice.
I've always said that of absentee ballots.
Abesentee ballots, like mail-in ballots, are also proven reliable and fraud-free.
But, don't let facts stand in the way of your delusions. That's not your style.
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The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
Before someone else “having a really bad day” decides to pick up a gun in response to their lies.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/media-demonizing-immigrants-
border/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%2003.31.2021&utm_term=daily
Over the past several weeks, we’ve all heard the news about what is happening at the border. Most of the headlines and commentary in the media have painted a picture of a “surge” of migrant children crossing the border on their own. They talk about this “security crisis” at the border over and over again. After hearing these news stories, it’s hard not to think that the United States is being invaded by brown children. Which we know is not the reality, but with the amount of coverage this issue gets and the type of narrative that the media focuses on, it’s hard for the public to see it through a different lens: through the lens of humanity.
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Why Can’t Republicans Be Populists?
The establishment has been routed, but its economic orthodoxy rules.
By Paul Krugman, March 29, 2021
President Biden’s American Rescue Plan is incredibly popular, even among Republican voters. We don’t have details yet on the next big Democratic initiative, but we can expect it to poll well, because we know that it will combine major infrastructure spending with tax hikes on corporations and the rich — which are all popular things.
But like the rescue plan, the next plan probably won’t get a single Republican vote in Congress. Why are elected Republicans still so committed to right-wing economic policies that help the rich while shortchanging the working class?
Fair warning: I’m not going to offer a good answer to this question. The point of today’s article is, instead, to argue for the question’s importance.
I ask why Republicans are “still” committed to right-wing economics because in the past there wasn’t any puzzle about their position.
Like many observers, I used to have a “What’s the matter with Kansas?” model of the G.O.P. That is, like Thomas Frank, the author of the 2004 book with that title, I saw the Republican Party essentially as an enterprise run by and for plutocrats that managed to win elections by playing to the cultural grievances and racial hostility of working-class whites. Bigotry, however, was mainly a show put on for the rubes; the party would go back to its pro-rich priorities as soon as each election was over.
The classic example came when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then followed his victory by announcing that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didn’t.)
But that feels like a long time ago.
Billionaires may have started the Republican Party on its march toward extremism, but they’ve clearly lost control of the forces they conjured up. The G.O.P. can no longer put intolerance back in the closet after each election so as to focus on the real business of tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, the extremists are in charge. Despite a lost election and a violent insurrection, what’s left of the old Republican establishment has abased itself on the altar of Trumpism.
But while power in the Republican Party has shifted almost completely away from the conservative establishment, the party is still committed to an economic ideology of tax and spending cuts. And it’s not obvious why.
When Donald Trump rolled over establishment candidates in 2016, it seemed possible that he would lead his party toward what some political scientists call “Herrenvolk democracy,” policies that are genuinely populist and even egalitarian — but only for members of the right racial and ethnic groups.
South Africa under apartheid worked that way. There were limited gestures toward whites-only populism in the Jim Crow U.S. South. In Europe, France’s National Front combines hostility to immigrants with calls for an expansion of the nation’s already generous welfare state.
As a candidate, Trump often sounded as if he wanted to move in that direction, promising not to cut social benefits and to begin a large infrastructure program. If he had honored those promises, if he had shown any hint of genuine populism, he might still be president. In practice, however, his tax cut and his failed attempt to repeal Obamacare were right out of the standard conservative playbook.
The exception that proves the rule was Trump’s farm policy, which involved huge subsidies to farmers hurt by his trade war, but managed to give almost all of those subsidies to whites. The point is that there was nothing like this on a broader level.
Was Trump’s continuation of unpopular economic policies simply a reflection of his personal ignorance and lack of interest in substance? Events since the election suggest not.
I’ve already mentioned lock-step Republican opposition to Biden’s relief package. Rejection of economic populism is also apparent at the state level. Consider Missouri. One of i
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
The Media blows them constantly.
The Media and everyone else needs to call them what they are.
They aren't demons. They are foreign invaders.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:That's quite an opinion. Could you back any of it up with some sort of facts?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
The Media blows them constantly.
The Media and everyone else needs to call them what they are.
They aren't demons. They are foreign invaders.
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Only After Boycott Threat, Delta CEO Reverses Praise Of Georgia’s Voter Suppression Law
Ed Bastain had some very kind words for SB 202 less than a week ago.
https://newsone.com/4119999/delta-ceo-reverses-praise-groegia-voting-l
aw/?omcamp=es-n1-nl&cx_medium=sailthru&cx_brand=no&cx_delivery=NewsOne&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NAT%20-%20NewsOne%20-%20Daily%20Dynamic%20Send%202021-04-01&utm_term=NewsOne%20Subscribers%20-%20SEND%20TO%20ME
fter threats of a boycott and being the target of other proposed protests against Delta Air Lines, its CEO is doing an about-face on the controversial topic of Georgia’s new law restricting voting access that is expected to disproportionately affect Black and brown communities.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian previously praised the new law — SB 202 — as recently as last week. But on Wednesday, he conveniently had a change of heart after the prospects of losing business during a time when the travel industry has already been crippled because of the pandemic.
After describing SB202 as having “improved” existing election laws, Bastain said Wednesday it was “unacceptable.” He suggested his words in a company statement were taken out of context and said he was finally setting the record straight about his opinion on the matter, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” Bastain wrote in an internal memo sent to Delta employees.
That didn’t match the same energy Bastain had when he selectively glossed over SB 202 provisions such as barriers to mobile voting, preventing volunteers from handing out water and other line-warming activities, and additional restrictions placed on absentee voting. Bastian’s previous statement also fed into claims that SB 202 promotes greater election security when there is no evidence that warrants a genuine concern of election integrity and security.
Bastain addressed that in his memo on Wednesday.
“The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true,” Bastain wrote. “Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.”
But Gov. Brian Kemp said Bastain was all-in on the bill leading up to it being signed into law.
“Today’s statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists,” Kemp said in a statement.
Bastain’s updated thoughts on SB 202 fell in line with civil rights and voting activists who called the law what it was: racist voter suppression.
“There’s no acceptable version of this bill partially because the entire premise is a lie,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, previously told NewsOne.
Calls for an economic boycott spread across social media after the passage of SB 202. Corporate accountability in democracy organizing has become a major topic after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Voting rights groups have been pushing back on Delta, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and other Georgia-based corporations that were exposed for donations to elected officials who supported voter suppression and Trump’s big lie. Demanding corporate support for HR 1 and HR 4 could be the next major push in this ongoing accountability effort.
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Delta is racist when you are! At least until you notice.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:That's quite an opinion. Could you back any of it up with some sort of facts?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
The Media blows them constantly.
The Media and everyone else needs to call them what they are.
They aren't demons. They are foreign invaders.
Why do you need somebody from the Media to tell you that people who are trying to come here illegally and leech off of our economy are invaders.
That's the real question. That's the only question.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Outdated filibuster rules allow a small minority of the US population to hold the rest of the country hostage
Right now, the 50 Senate Democrats represent roughly 61% of the country’s population, according to census data. The filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% percent of the population to gridlock the government. Again, considering that it only takes 50% of the state's vote to get elected to the Senate, the filibuster means that about 11% of America's voting-age population could successfully elected Republican senators who can theoretically block anything that polls show the overwhelming majority of the country might want.
As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.
Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.
“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the founders had in mind,” said the Senate Republican whip, John Thune, in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority if unchecked could trample the rights of the minority … so the founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”
But an inconvenient fact undermines Thune’s argument and should set pluralists at ease: even if the filibuster were eliminated and bills could advance on a simple majority vote, the Senate would still be giving a minority of the American population enough Senate representation to block legislation supported by the majority of the country.
In the debate over the filibuster, then, the question is not whether you believe the majority should rule. Instead, the question is this: how small a minority should be given legislative veto power over the rest of the country?
More at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/26/just-how-severe-
will-americas-minority-rule-become
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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