I thought you could defeat hate

Democratic candidate Joe Biden went to Kenosha, Wis., the city where Jacob Blake was shot and paralyzed. Biden went just a day or so after the nasty guy went. You can guess what the nasty guy did while there, so I’ll let you read about it elsewhere.

Biden met with Blake and with Blake’s family and their lawyers. Then he held a community meeting. Biden had been more optimistic about America’s racial justice, saying:

I made a mistake about something. I thought you could defeat hate. Hate only hides. And when someone in authority breathes oxygen under that rock, it legitimizes those folks to come on out from under the rocks.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that the company Louis DeStroy left when he took over the Postal Service has had a big jump in contracts with and income from the USPS. Yeah, that looks fishy. It is being included in the investigations of all the other things DeStroy has been doing since taking over the USPS.



Michael Harriot tweeted a thread saying he thinks the sabotage of the USPS and mail-in voting is more about the 2016 election than the 2020.

People said that the Russians (meaning Sergey Kislyak in this case) could have changed votes in the 2016 election and didn’t. How do they know they weren’t? Harriot also reviews a few anomalies, such as a server in Georgia that had been wiped clean. There were also votes flipped and votes lost from black precincts. But election security experts say without “before and after snapshots” of the computer systems how can anyone tell?

Harriot says they can tell through data analysis. That analysis needs a huge data set of hand marked ballots. As in mail-in ballots.

Simply sabotaging mail-in votes damages both GOP and Democratic votes. Also, only one party is objecting to mail-in voting. That sabotage makes more sense if this is also to prevent being able to analyze the 2016 election.

Harriot based this on the writings of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.



Jennifer Cohn, writing for Medium, has some tips for mitigating threats to voting. Here are some of them:

* Apply for vote by mail ASAP and return the ballot in person.
* If voting in person, take your ID.
* Ask for a hand marked paper ballot instead of using a touchscreen.
* If you must use a touchscreen verify the vote is recorded as you intended. Many have a paper printout for that purpose. Check all races.
* Vote all races. Incoming state legislatures will be redrawing district boundaries, a process open to gerrymandering.
* Confirm your voter registration.
* If you see problems call Election Protection Hotline.
* Volunteer to be a poll worker or poll watcher.
* Demand cellular modems be removed from ballot scanners.
* Join Protect Our Votes to photograph precinct totals before they are sent to the city or county.
* Watch Secretary of State or county websites as totals are displayed. Take regular screenshots. Look for anomalies (such as totals dropping).
* Don’t let your candidates concede if they lose unexpectedly.



Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that there are now videos of people being evicted from their homes. He included one of an eviction in Houston. He wrote:

There are two things at work here: the failure of the worldview that excludes housing as a human right, and the worldview that believes only giving out taxpayer money to the richest entities among us. As people are evicted, the number of evictions, the sizes of the debts, and the prospects of gainful employment all match up to an enormous multimillion dollar hole in local economies that will need federal assistance.

On top of all of that, throwing out tens of millions of people is not simply inhumane, it is asinine. While it is pretty well documented that the case numbers of COVID-19 across the country, but especially in places like Houston, are far higher than what are the official—already terrible—numbers. Those numbers can only get worse as people lose the ability to literally shelter in place, a foundational physical aspect of social distancing.
...
Without extended unemployment benefits, without better unemployment benefits, millions of Americans have moved beyond needing help to needing a ton of help. Every day, every week that our current administration, the House, and the Republican-led Senate sit on their hands, the price tag of what this crisis will cost us in the long run grows exponentially.

Future Hashtag tweeted about housing in response to a thread by Bree Newsome Bass (which is short and I’ll let you read).

And yet this crisis has nothing to do with a shortage of homes

We have homes for everyone. We're just gonna crash society instead.

Just so nobody gets anything they didn't "earn".

America is going to die of spite.

What you are seeing around us is America collapsing under the weight of its hatred of the poor and minorities.
...
Poverty is a solvable problem. Not in decades or centuries, but within a single Presidential Administration. Practically. Feasibly.

It. Always. Has. Been.

Poverty in America hasn't been solved simply because America believes that the poor didn't earn a solution.
...
It's not that America CAN'T do better. It's not that it doesn't WANT to do better. It does.

But it's also simply not willing to put in the effort.

I agree with all this but the last bit. America, well actually the GOP, doesn’t want to do better. It’s a supremacy thing. They make themselves look better because the poor people around them look so bad.