Seriously. She’s a very appealing looking politicians. But she’s awful:
This woman is taking credit for her COVID response — which is one of the worst in the nation. Her state ranks 8th per capita in COVID deaths and 2nd in cases. But she’s proud of it.
It appears she isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.
Another Republican state uses the excuse of Donald Trump’s Big Lie to suppress votes. They have to do it, you see. Republicans who believe Trump’s Big Lie have “lost faith” in the system and the only way to restore it is to make sure that Democrats can’t win elections. Perfectly understandable.
The Texas Senate in the early morning hours Thursday passed a package of election bills that would put new restrictions on voting in the state.
The final version of the Senate Bill 7 is not yet online for review, but the original bill banned overnight early voting hours and drive-thru early voting, while restricting how election officials handle mail voting.
The bill underwent hours of debate and “scores” of proposed amendments before passage, according to the bill’s author, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes.
“This bill is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said in a social media video posted after 3 a.m. in Austin.
The bill now heads to the Texas House of Representatives, which is considering its own omnibus package of restrictions, House Bill 6, later Thursday.
The Texas legislature leads the nation in restrictive voting bills, according to the Brennan Center for Justice; 49 bills have been introduced to add restrictions on access to the ballot box.
Advocates have slammed the Senate bill as unnecessary and a major threat to voting rights.
“SB 7 is the most dangerous threat to voting rights we’ve seen in years,” Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement. “The biggest threats to election integrity are codified racist attacks on voters, unequal access to the polls, and harassment by partisan poll watchers who would seek to disrupt safe and fair elections.”
In an interview with NBC News last month, Hughes said that the 2020 election increased interest in legislation Texas lawmakers were already keen on passing.
“This was already in process, but then the 2020 election was so in the national spotlight, and so many people have questions, so many people have concerns,” he told NBC News last week. “I would say that has raised the profile of the issue.”
These people don’t even try to hide the fact that they simply don’t want people voting. The only thing that could justify all these actions would be proof of systematic voter fraud as a result of expanded opportunities to vote. There is none. So we know why they are doing this: to suppress the vote of Democrats and pander to Donald Trump and his ignorant cult.
Now that major businesses including Georgia-based firms are announcing opposition to Georgia Republican’s voter suppression act, state elected Republicans feel all betrayed and retaliatory.
The chief executives of two of Georgia’s biggest corporations sharply criticized the state’s voting restrictions, reversing weeks of milder statements about the new election law pushed through the Legislature by Republican lawmakers.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said in a memo to employees Wednesday that the law was “unacceptable” and “based on a lie” of widespread fraud in last November’s election. Hours later, Coca-Cola’s CEO also pronounced the measure “unacceptable.”
The statements came as Georgia companies faced growing threats of boycotts from voting rights advocates who say local corporations should have done more to oppose the legislation before it was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp last week. Tens of thousands of social media postscarrying the hashtags #BoycottDelta, #BoycottDeltaAirlines and #BoycottCocaCola proliferated on Twitter in recent days.
The CEOs’ comments triggered threats of backlash from Republican legislators who embraced the contentious election overhaul as a necessary measure to restore confidence.
More than 70 top Black executives from across the U.S. called on corporate America to publicly oppose any legislation limiting Americans’ right to vote. In a full-page ad placed in The New York Times, Merck & Co. CEO Kenneth Frazier, former American Express CEO Ken Chenault and the other executives described the Georgia law and measures being contemplated in other states as “undemocratic and un-American, and they are wrong.”
It seemed for a while that Republicans meant to show private business who’s the overseer in Georgia:
“They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” said House Speaker David Ralston, adding: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”
But that was all bluster. The Georgia Senate adjourned without acting on the House-passed retribution.
The backlash was only a matter of time:
Stacey Abrams is not ready to call for a boycott but not opposed to one either:
Boycotts work. The focused power of No, trained on corporate actors used to being told Yes, can yield transformative results. As a Black person, a Southerner, an American, I respect and defend the right to boycott — and the advancement of civil rights has relied heavily on economic boycotts. Indeed, the very threat of such a call to action by Georgia’s faith leaders spurred the hasty adoption and cloistered signing of our state’s new restrictive voting law.
[…]
However, one lesson of boycotts is that the pain of deprivation must be shared to be sustainable. Otherwise, those least resilient bear the brunt of these actions; and in the aftermath, they struggle to access the victory. And boycotts are complicated affairs that require a long-term commitment to action. I have no doubt that voters of color, particularly Black voters, are willing to endure the hardships of boycotts. But I don’t think that’s necessary — yet.
It did not take long for North Carolina Republicans to feel the economic heat after passge of their infamous (and imitated) bathroom bill. Georgia Republicans were too Trumped-up to heed that lesson.
North Carolina Republicans are so Trumped-up that they have already forgotten the lesson that cost them the governor’s mansion in 2016. The NC GOP has introduced a bill with the same name as Georgia’s. Sometimes them dogs is slow to learn:
At only five pages, Senate Bill 326 is less onerous than its Georgia counterpart. But there is likely a committee substitute in some legislator’s drawer with more draconian features crafted on the Georgia model. The 2013 voter ID bill jumped overnight from 17 to over 50 pages in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder.
Do they feel lucky?
“Broadband internet is the new electricity,” declares the White House’s fact sheet on the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan the president announced Thursday in Pittsburgh. “It is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school learning, health care, and to stay connected.” If there are any positives to come out of the last year of pandemic that realization is one.
The virus forced many Americans to work or attend school from home. But that was not possible in many places in the same way electricity was unavailable until the 1936 Rural Electrification Act brought electricity to nearly the entire country and economic benefits and improved quality of life with it. An engineering professor once touted the improvement made in people lives by washing machines. They run on electricity the way businesses today run on the internet.
Biden proposes delivery of broadband to 100 percent of the country by the end of the decade while prioritizing “broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives.” He may plan to “mobilize private investment” in other areas, but not here. The goal is to provide affordable service not just to every community but to marginalized ones for-profit ventures do not.
“Government has a comparative advantage in providing public goods — education, training, roads, ports, basic research — which indeed figure largely in Mr. Biden’s plan,” the Washington Post Editorial Board notes. Biden hopes to leverage that advantage.
The Guardian adds:
The billions in broadband funds include money set aside for building internet infrastructure on tribal lands, which will be created in consultation with tribal communities, the administration said. Civil rights and internet freedom advocates celebrated the announcement on Wednesday.
“The President’s broadband announcement is a win for every family and business in America, in every part of the country,” said James P Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense, a nonprofit digital advocacy group. “Broadband for all is a policy whose time has come.”
The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts long ago eroded Democrats’ marketability in rural America where rural electrification was a past generation’s moon shot. Thanks to right-wing talk radio dating from the Reagan years and Fox News in the next decade, Republican conservatism has long held sway in parts of the country that felt left behind by an increasingly tech-driven economy. Perceptions those outlets fed that Democrats cared more about urban minorities than rural “real Americans” deepened the divide that leaves Republican senators representing tens of millions fewer Americans than Democrats do.
That 50-50 split in the Senate will make passage of Biden’s plan a tough climb. Republicans oppose government spending and tax increases (by Democrats) on what passes for principle these days. That “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke under Donald Trump barely registered with them. They have no interest in seeing another New Deal eroding their hold on red states or on the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court.
Biden’s plan, says the New York Times’ David E. Sanger, “is based on the gamble that the country is ready to dispense with one of the main tenets of the Reagan revolution, and show that for some tasks the government can jump-start the economy more efficiently than market forces. Mr. Biden has also made a bet that the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic and the social and racial inequities it underscored have changed the political center of gravity for the nation.”
Aside from improving lives in rural America and increasing job opportunities, expanding internet access there will make it easier for Democrats to reach voters propagandized for decades by right-wing media in a left vacuum. First they have to pass Biden’s plan and deliver on what has in the past been the empty promise of rural broadband.