So bizarre
Category: Local Interest,
‘You couldn’t spend a dime?’: Jay Inslee ticks off the wrong state – POLITICO
The DGA did not spend a cent on television advertising for Kelly — a stark contrast to the $645,000 the RGA spent on ads for Sununu, according to Advertising Analytics. And in the final few weeks of the race, multiple internal polls on both sides showed the contest had tightened. Kelly personally pleaded with Inslee and the DGA to pour more money into the race saying that it was still winnable, according to Democrats with knowledge of those conversations.
…“We were extremely surprised that the DGA did not invest more resources in the race, especially in the closing days,” the official said. “Instead, the DGA invested resources in places like Alaska, a race that was already lost for them. And they invested significant resources in states like Rhode Island, which ended up being a blowout for Gov. Raimondo.”
…“I happen to think that Molly was a great candidate and I think she could have won,” Dean said. “A lot of my New Hampshire friends agree with me. I can’t get into the merits of this argument but the thing that interests me is because it’s New Hampshire they have a special role in making people’s lives miserable after the fact.”
‘You couldn’t spend a dime?’: Jay Inslee ticks off the wrong state – POLITICO
[snicker] Good luck in New Hampshire, Jay!
Virgin and Partners Want to Build Up Rail Travel in Florida
Cheap gasoline and the interstate road system are all very well, but they’ve caused congestion, pollution, urban sprawl and many road deaths. In contrast, Florida railway passengers can sip champagne or beer and make use of the free Wi-Fi. Ticket prices are reasonable. Once constructed, the Miami to Orlando journey should be slightly more than three hours. In good traffic, driving takes a bit longer than that.
…Building on existing rail corridors where possible, 1 and operating trains at slower speeds, has cut costs and overcome potential regulatory holdups in Florida.
Virgin Trains Billionaires Want to Restore Glory of U.S. Railroad – Bloomberg
hmmmm
America’s Oldest Mall Now Contains 48 Charming Low-Cost Micro-Apartments
Starting at an affordable $550 a month, residents can rent an Arcade Providence, one-bedroom unit that’s 225 to 450 square feet in size. Inside, there’s a built-in bed, full bathroom, refrigerator, sink, microwave, dishwasher, seating, and storage. For more amenities, tenants can also use the shared TV room, game room, on-site laundry facility, bike storage area, or parking garage that’s located across the street. The only catch is that there’s a waiting list with about 4,000 people currently on it.
America’s Oldest Mall Now Contains 48 Charming Low-Cost Micro-Apartments
Micro apartments started with such promise but have turned into another expensive yuppie fad. 4000 people on the waiting list? No published prices? You can guarantee yourself that it costs a lot more than $550 a month to get into one of these apartments these days.
Boulder City Council to hold special meeting Monday in response to police incident – Boulder Daily Camera
Last Sunday, more than 600 converged at the March for Boulder Police Oversight to walk from Naropa University to the police station and to call for a civilian oversight board, as well as the removal of rifles from all police cars and the allowance for people to submit anonymous complaints to the department.
…At the conclusion of the investigation, which is expected to take 60 to 90 days, the police department will publicly release all body camera video and an executive summary of the investigation.
An investigation is a good thing but the only thing taht matter is the department’s actions after it is concluded. If those actions do not included publicly making an example out of officers who cross the line, the department has no claim on contributing to law and order.
Reconnecting With Rural America
The importance of speaking to and about rural America remains critically important to the future of the Democratic Party and of Democratic candidates. A failure to do so will continue the losses the party and its candidates have sustained over the last 15 years.
…During that same period, our national party has lost the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, a majority of governorships, state legislative chambers, and the presidency. I contend that many of these losses would have been avoided had the party and our candidates truly shown up in rural areas, talked to and about the contributions of rural America to the rest of the country, and outlined a real, well-thought-out plan to rebuild and revive the rural economy.
It is bad enough that we didn’t show up, didn’t talk up the contributions of rural Americans, and didn’t lay out a positive vision for real economic change in rural areas, but we also failed to counteract the negative narrative about government that seeped into those rural areas.
…If the Democratic Party is the party of effective government, we should say so and make the case to all Americans that government plays a positive role in our country. ….Democrats should make a consistent effort to communicate to rural Americans using local and regional media outlets, those that people in rural areas read and listen to every day to find out what is happening in their part of the world.
…Our elected officials and our candidates also have to show up in rural areas in order to win. And when they do, they need to talk up, not down, to rural Americans. Acknowledging the contributions rural America makes to the rest of the country is a good place to start. Recognizing their frustrations and concerns, as well as their hopes and dreams, is an important part of an effective and winning message.
…The number of people addicted to, or misusing, opioids is staggering. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than 90 Americans die every day after overdosing on opioids.
Rural America has been devastated by this epidemic. To begin with, rural Americans have limited access to health care generally, but this is even more acute with the services needed to combat addictions. More than 85 percent of the 1669 federally designated mental health professional shortage areas are in rural areas.
….To combat this scourge in the short term will require physicians trained to use opioids only in very limited circumstances and to prescribe non-addictive pain treatment in most cases. Drug companies need to provide Naloxone in more convenient and easier-to-administer ways while keeping costs down. MAT and full counseling services need to be more accessible to rural Americans. And, we all need to recognize that addiction is a disease just like cancer or diabetes so we can help remove the stigma attached to addiction disorders. Removing this stigma will help make it easier for those in need of help to seek it. What we don’t need is exactly what the Trump Administration is touting: more law enforcement, harsher penalties, and longer jail sentences.
Over the long haul, the most successful “cure” to the opioid epidemic will be a rebuilt and revived rural economy. If people in rural areas believe, with good reason, that their tomorrow will be better than their today, we will see a sharp decline in today’s unacceptably high levels of lives lost to despair.
…For far too long, we have allowed the rural economy to be an “extraction” economy where everything from crops to coal are being taken from rural areas and transported somewhere else where value is added and opportunity is created. To succeed in rural areas, Democrats also need to offer a “sustainable” alternative to the extraction economy of the past. If not, that extraction economy will continue to slowly bleed rural America of its natural resources and its young people.
…A Democratic-promoted sustainable economy based on partnerships must sustain rural families, communities, and natural resources in a manner consistent with the values and culture of rural places.
…Democrats may find fault with production agriculture, since they often believe it to denote only large-scale, commercial-size operations or “factory farms.” But that is not how it is understood in the countryside, where the history and culture are rooted in production agriculture defined as family farms. Indeed, most large scale commercial-size operations are owned and operated by families.
…In rural America, trade agreements are viewed positively by most in the agricultural sector. Without robust exports, we would have many fewer farm families because exports help to stabilize prices in most major commodities.
…A key to building a sustainable rural economy is supporting and building local and regional markets where small-sized operations not only survive, but thrive.
Democrats must lead the effort to adequately build more local and regional markets and the smaller-scale operations that need them. Democrats must advocate for more money for micro-loans to help beginning farmers get started. Democrats must also advocate for tailored risk-management tools that enable small-sized operations to survive during challenging times. Democrats must demand more conservation resources targeted to small operations served by a local or regional market. Democrats must partner with private investment firms to finance more food hubs where locally produced goods can be aggregated and sold to large-scale purchasers. Democrats must devise tax and regulatory incentives designed to improve opportunities for the success of local and regional markets.
…One immediate benefit from more investment in conservation will be increased opportunities for outdoor recreation. Conservation improves landscape and increases habitat, which increases hunting, fishing, biking, canoeing, and kayaking. Outdoor recreation is a big business—over a $600 billion industry today —and a rural job creator, with many of the 6 million employed by the industry living in rural places.
… The sustainable approach to rural job creation should, in the future, depend more on bio-based inputs in manufacturing. The use of plants, crops, and animal waste to produce a wide variety of materials, chemicals, fabrics, fibers, fuel, and energy can bring sustainable manufacturing back to rural America. The job-creation possibilities for rural America through a sustainable approach are truly endless.
…A foundation of production agriculture and exports, local and regional food systems, ecosystem markets, and bio-based manufacturing can help build an economy that truly works in rural areas. And advocating and supporting such government action that helps create this kind of economy would give Democrats a successful progressive message for reaching rural areas.
…To help people you have to govern, to govern you have to win elections, and to win elections you have to appeal broadly. For Democrats, that means making a concerted effort to offer a more comprehensive, progressive vision to rural Americans.
Reconnecting With Rural America : Democracy Journal
hmmm
The Powerful Role Confusion Plays In American Elections
Ahead of the November election, Georgia became what many were calling “ground zero” in the battle over voting rights. In October, the AP reported that Kemp, then the secretary of state, had marked roughly 53,000 voter registration applications as pending because the information on their registration applications didn’t exactly match the information on file with state agencies. Around 70 percent of the pending applications, the AP said, belonged to black voters. Advocates expressed concerns that voters would get to the polls, unaware that they weren’t eligible to vote.
…“Voters were showing up to the polling places and poll workers weren’t even aware that they needed to check a separate list of pending registrations,” Henderson said. As a result, voters had to argue with their poll workers in order to cast a ballot, exacerbating their confusion.
Part of the issue was that even the court ruling was confusing. People whose registrations had previously been purged could cast regular ballots if their ID’s showed a “substantial match” with what was on the state’s voter roles. That term was not defined by the court.
…An unknown number of voters were also forced to cast provisional ballots, including many Atlanta-area students like Perry. Voters, poll workers, and election protections volunteers were all unclear what would happen with provisional ballots. Some voters were told that if they voted out-of-precinct, their votes for statewide office would count, but that turned out to be false.
…He left the church unsure what a provisional ballot was, why he was given one, and whether his vote would count.
…I watched many like her leave polling places in Atlanta with orange papers in their hands — the telltale sign that they were forced to vote provisional (Poll workers gave an orange paper to provisional voters that explained how they could follow up to make sure their votes counted.)
….Across Georgia, tens of thousands of people experienced problems registering to vote and casting a ballot. Georgia’s election laws were complicated, and voting policies were changing right up until the day of the election. Many voters remained unclear whether their ballots had counted. Even more questioned whether the election was legitimate.
…Similar scenarios played out this year in parts of Missouri and Florida. Two of 2018’s most competitive gubernatorial elections may have swung on voter confusion.
…On Election Day, ProPublica and the Huffington Post reported that poll workers incorrectly turned voters away for not providing a photo ID. Signs still hung at polling places with the outdated requirements, and voters said they had to argue with election workers in order to cast ballots. County supervisors reported being understaffed and having minimal time to train poll workers on the changed law.
…In other parts of Georgia, voters had to wait four and a half hours to cast ballots because of broken machines. Some of them left their polling places, expressing concern about the situation and whether the lines would be shorter later in the day.
…“Anything that causes confusion is a form of voter suppression, whether it’s intentional or whether it’s just unintended consequences.”
…With hurdles to voting come confusion. This has been the case since a very early hurdle, voter registration, was put in place in the second half of the nineteenth century. ….Registration alone was enough to dramatically decrease the participation of racial and ethnic minorities.
In the 21st century, lawmakers — specifically, Republicans crying fraud — have sought to put in place new and creative hurdles to casting a ballot. One of the most popular obstacles used in recent years is voter ID. And with each new hurdle comes incidental, or intentional, confusion.
A total of 34 states have laws requiring voters to show some form of ID when they cast a ballot. Research shows that roughly 11 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t have the necessary ID, and that number is even higher among seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students.
…In Georgia and Missouri, voter confusion was caused by lawmakers and elections officials who purposely passed laws making it more difficult for certain voters to cast ballots and the legal battles that followed. In other words, the confusion was intentional.
…In Broward County, Fla., [yes, THAT Broward County, FL] for example, elections officials designed the ballot for the November 2018 election with the Senate race tucked in a corner under the instructions, which many voters overlooked. According to MCI Maps, about 3.7 percent of voters — 30,896 people — skipped voting for U.S. senator. That number is as much as 2.5 percent more than in most other counties.
…The authors noted that in Broward County, more people voted for the commissioner of agriculture and county CFO than for their U.S. senator.
The number of votes separating former Sen. Bill Nelson (D) and Rick Scott, who ultimately won, was far smaller than the number of people who skipped voting in the race. Many questioned whether poor ballot design, and the resulting voter confusion, ended up costing Nelson his seat in the Senate.
…“This is not rocket science,” she said. “Not only are there knowable conventions — things that more often than not are going to be the right way to handle it — it’s also not impossible to test it.”
Issues like those in Broward County this year point to how many different kinds of problems cause confusion, and how many different kinds of problems need to be addressed.
“There are some that are just straight-up intentional suppressing of certain communities,” Perez said. “There’s mistakes that are made because people are not resourced or they’re not trained or they’re moving too quickly and they don’t have enough fact checks. And then there’s this third category of mistakes that happen when folks are told they’re going to have these types of problems and they don’t invest the resources anyway.”
…Together, it’s resulted in a country where voters have lost faith in elections.
…Still, experts say solutions are possible. One major way to simplify elections, and to create fail-safes for voters who might be confused, is to expand opportunities to cast ballots. That includes lengthening early voting periods and hours and allowing people to register to vote on the same day that they cast a ballot.
…Automatic voter registration provides another way to simplify elections. If eligible citizens are automatically added to the rolls when they turn 18, they no longer will have to worry about figuring out the steps needed to ensure that they are on the rolls.
…He explained that first and foremost, Americans need to recognize that elections can and should be less complicated.
“In what’s supposed to be the greatest democracy in the world. This [type of confusion and all of these obstacles to voting] just shouldn’t exist.”
The Powerful Role Confusion Plays In American Elections – Talking Points Memo
Sigh….
Georgia state lawmaker proposes ‘testicular bill of rights’ in response to anti-abortion legislation
Kendrick’s tweet included an image of her proposed legislation, which would require men to obtain permission from their sex partner before obtaining erectile dysfunction medication and ban vasectomy procedures.
…The legislation also includes stipulations that would require DNA testing once a woman is six weeks and one day pregnant to “determine the father of the child who shall IMMEDIATELY start paying child support.”
The bill also would make it an aggravated assault crime for a man to have sex without a condom. The final stipulation on Kendrick’s list proposes a 24-hour waiting period for men to purchase any porn or sex toys in Georgia.
hmmmm
Trump Should Pay $5.6 Million Penalty Over Charity, N.Y. Says
President Donald Trump should pay a $5.6 million penalty on top of $2.8 million in restitution for spending money from his charitable foundation on business and political purposes, the New York attorney general told a judge in seeking a ruling without a trial.
Neither Trump nor his three eldest children, all of whom had senior roles at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, have provided evidence rebutting the state’s claims that they failed to meet as a board, oversee grant-making or implement policies to protect the charity’s funds from abuse.
Trump Should Pay $5.6 Million Penalty Over Charity, N.Y. Says – Bloomberg
hmmm
New York judge won’t let unvaccinated children return to school
A federal judge, citing an “unprecedented measles outbreak” in suburban Rockland County, New York, has denied a request to let 44 unvaccinated children return to school.
New York judge won’t let unvaccinated children return to school – MarketWatch
hmmmm
Black Lawmakers to Block Legalized Marijuana in N.Y. if Their Communities Don’t Benefit
The lawmakers say that unless people of color are guaranteed a share of the potentially $3 billion industry, there may be no legalization this year. They want to be assured that some of that money will go toward job training programs, and that minority entrepreneurs will receive licenses to cultivate or sell the marijuana.
…They say one misstep, in particular, stands out: None of the 10 states or Washington ensured that minority communities would share in any economic windfall of legalization — missing out on an opportunity to redress years of having a disproportionate number of African-Americans arrested on marijuana charges.
…Critics say marijuana legalization has fostered an inequitable system in which wealthy, white investors often reap the profits of the fledgling industry.
In Colorado, black entrepreneurs said they were banned from winning licenses because of marijuana-related convictions. Black people make up just a handful of the thousands of cultivation or dispensary license holders there, and continue to be arrested on marijuana-related charges at almost three times the rate of white people.
In California, several cities introduced equity programs retroactively. Oakland now requires at least half of licenses to go to people with a cannabis-related conviction and who fell below an income threshold.
…Ms. Peoples-Stokes, a Democrat who represents a district that includes Buffalo. She has introduced her own bill, which directs half of all marijuana revenue to a community fund supporting job training, and prioritizes licenses for people from communities most affected by criminalization.
…That concern has made itself so clear that the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association, worried that legislators might seek to shut them out of the new industry, sent a letter to Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders on Monday promising to set up a $25 million “Cannabis Economic Opportunity Fund” to provide zero-interest loans to companies led by women and people of color.
…The City Council’s Progressive Caucus and the Black Latino and Asian Caucus recently introduced laws and resolutions calling for the city to have local control over home delivery and cultivation of marijuana, potentially allowing smaller businesses to share in the sales.
“Not arresting people is not good enough,” Donovan Richards, a city councilman from Queens, said. “Economic justice must be served.”
hmmmm
Metalheads with kazoos drown out Westboro Baptist Church at Capitol
A couple hundred metalheads with kazoos converged on the state Capitol on Monday morning to defend one of their own by drowning out a small group of Westboro Baptist Church members.
The Kansas-based hate group said it came to Virginia in part to demonstrate against Del. Danica Roem, D-Manassas, who is the state’s first and only openly transgender lawmaker.
Roem also happens to be a metal singer, which prompted Richmond-based singer Randy Blythe, who fronts the well-known band Lamb of God and considers Roem a friend, to organize what he called a “counter-party.”
Metalheads with kazoos drown out Westboro Baptist Church at Capitol – Virginia Mercury
God bless America.
How New Orleans Reduced Its Homeless Population By 90 Percent
The group put all its effort behind gathering a rent assistance fund.
…The team took a “Housing First” approach, which is “simply the idea that you accept people as they are,” whether they are sober or not.
“You just accept them as they are and you provide the housing first,” Kegel says. “Then, once they’re in their apartment, you immediately wrap all the services around them that they need to stay stable and live the highest quality life that they can live.”
…”It is costing the taxpayer a tremendous amount of money to leave people on the street. They’re constantly cycling in and out of jail on charges that wouldn’t even be relevant if they had an apartment, things like urinating in public, drinking in public, obstructing the sidewalk because they’re having to sleep on the sidewalk. Homeless offences, in other words, that are costing the taxpayers a lot of money to be putting them in jail and processing them through the criminal justice system. Their health is deteriorating while they’re out on the street. They’re being taken by ambulance to the emergency room constantly. Those are huge charges.”
…”This is permanent housing. How long the rent assistance lasts depends on what people need.”
How New Orleans Reduced Its Homeless Population By 90 Percent | Here & Now
hmmm
General Motors employees rally outside of Ohio plant on last day – New York Daily News
General Motors employees rally outside of Ohio plant on last day – New York Daily News
Thank God, Trump saved all those factory jobs.
Doh!
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 