America’s Achilles heel

Some things collecting in my browser tabs

When one looks at a county map of America colored by which candidate won the 2016 US presidential race a great deal of the country is red. One could wonder why the nasty guy didn’t win by a landslide. Karin Douïeb created a map that morphs each county into a circle proportional to is population. Most of the red areas shrink to little dots in a sea of white while the blue areas blossom in size. I saw another tweet of this map that reminds us land doesn’t vote. People do.

Scroll down a bit to the second map in this twitter thread, which has a few corrections.



Journalist Greg Palast wrote the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His general thesis: 2016 was stolen. 2020 will be too. Egoberto Willies of Daily Kos quotes from Palast’s website:

What went down in Michigan is a case study of malfeasance, and much of what happened there was repeated elsewhere.

At least 75,355 ballots were not counted there in 2016. What’s more, most of these were from Detroit and Flint, both majority Black cities (82+% and 55+% respectively). According to CNN exit polls, 92% of Black voters in Michigan voted for Hillary. So if half these uncounted ballots were cast by Black voters at that ratio, an additional 34,662 votes would have been tallied in Hillary’s column and given her the state by a margin of 23,958 votes.

These ballots were not counted because they were unreadable by machines. When the oval next to a candidate’s name on the paper ballot was not filled in correctly — i.e., it was checked or was marked with red ink — the machine did not register it and the ballot was set aside. In other cases, no voter error occurred and the machines simply didn’t work.

I remember news reports about attempted recounts that were halted because of irregularities. Now the question is why didn’t Palast’s warnings and analysis of vote theft get a lot of media attention then or now? Palast said:

We have a great myth that we have a great Democracy and any journalist that dares break that BS myth is persona non grata. That's just the darn truth.

Senator and presidential candidate Kamela Harris tweeted a thread about the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Russia report. Excerpts of her tweets:

"At the direction of the Kremlin," Russians threatened our democracy in 2016—and that threat remains for 2020. And one issue they exploited is racial tensions in America.
…
America’s Achilles heel is rooted in racism, and this report confirms that Russia exploited deep racial divisions in a “strategic assault on the United States” to “sow discord” in America in the 2016 presidential election.
…
I think of America as a family—and like any family, we have issues. We have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation that we need to confront.

But someone came into our house and inflamed these tensions to turn us against each other. We can't let that happen again.

Mark Anderson of the Daily Kos community poses the question: What is the purpose of a college education? Train a person for the workforce? Or allow a person to learn how to think and be a contributor to society?

A vocational school or an associates degree fits with the first question. A bachelor degree or higher fits the second.

This question came up because Bernie Sanders proposed canceling student debt. Joey Saladino replied, “How about people just stop getting super expensive useless degrees?”

That answer tells Anderson a lot about Saladino. Restricting access to higher education (currently by reducing government support and thus making it too expensive for many people) has long been a GOP goal. So what do we do about degrees for jobs that just don’t pay much? Like teacher. Is that a useless degree? Should colleges stop offering classes in teaching?

College teaches about life. And though college isn’t for everyone, it is rarely useless. So let’s get back to public funding of education. Let’s tax the rich and corporations as necessary to make it free for everyone.



This year’s State Energy Efficiency Scorecard has been released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. It rated each state and the District of Columbia on several areas:

* Utility policies

* Transportation policies, such as policies for tailpipe emissions, electric cars, and transit funding.

* Building Energy Efficiency policies

* Heat and Power policies, such as support for low income efficiencies.

* State Government-led initiatives, such as financial incentives and efforts that lead by example.

* Appliance efficiency standards

The basic report is 150 pages with another 50 pages of appendices. I’ve looked at it, though haven’t read much. The PDF file is here.

At the top is Massachusetts, earning 44.5 points out of 50 possible. Close behind are California, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Michigan is 13th with a score of 28.5. At the bottom are North Dakota with a score of 5 out of 50 and Wyoming with a score of 4.5