It’s always a grift with these people.

It’s not even surprising anymore. Oh… wow… the Scooby Doo villain’s mask came off again… crazy… who ever could have seen that coming… crazy…

It’s just tedious.

I was so disappointed when Kamala came out strong for Medicare For All and then pretty much immediately caved and walked it back.

I have a strong suspicion that there is enormous pressure from the business world to keep the healthcare system the way it is. I’d bet almost anything that the instant healthcare is no longer tied to employment there is going to be a mass exodus of people from their jobs, and an absolute explosion of people starting their own businesses. I mean, I’ve had about half a dozen good scalable business ideas waiting and ready to go for years now, and the only reason I haven’t pursued them is because it would probably mean giving up my health insurance. I can’t possibly be alone in that.

And I bet if we got socialized health care, a lot of the problems we have right now with suppressed wages and poor working conditions would suddenly have a way of working themselves out.

They fucking better, because he’s definitely going to.

Bezos: “Hey Donald, I stopped my Washington Post editors from endorsing Kamala for you. Didn’t I do good, daddy?”

Trump: “Fuck you! Lawsuit! Fuck you!”

Where I live we have a thing called BallotTrax. You sign up once and it automatically sends you notifications for that stuff so you don’t have to remember to check. I really like it.

In the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the “Good” Witch is actually a ruthless drug kingpin.

She used her magic powers to summon a tornado and then merks the Wicked Witch of the East with Dorothy’s house. She then puts WWotE’s shoes on Dorothy in order to make her a target for WWotE’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. Glenda then uses Dorothy as a stooge to bump off WWotW, thereby putting herself in control of Oz’s vast fields of opium poppies, and cornering the entire opium trade.

It doesn’t make sense any other way. Glenda could have told Dorothy to use the ruby slippers to get home at literally any point, but instead sends her on a wild goose chase, and uses her as a blunt instrument to take out the only other bases of power remaining in Oz: the WWotW, and the Wizard, who Dorothy exposes as a fraud. Only then does she tell Dorothy to click her heels, and poof: everything is all wrapped up with a bow, and Glenda’s hands are clean. Her two main rivals are dead, and the Wizard is fleeing Oz in disgrace.

It’s some fucking Kaiser Söze level shit.

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

Sounds like someone is trying to immanentize the eschaton.

They criticize everything the Democrats do. Literally everything. They double down on anything that catches traction. The more traction it gets, the harder they push it.

That’s my recollection as well.

I really hope the Denver one doesn’t pass. It’s basically targeting one small employee-owned meat processor (the one local chefs go to for higher quality meat products), trying to force them to close. And that will shunt all their business to the huge industrial slaughterhouse up north in Greely.

City Cast Denver interviewed the supposed whistle blower that the campaign to shut the place down are holding up as an example of how awful the place is supposed to be, and it turns out the parts which aren’t untrue are wildly exaggerated. The whole thing feels kind of sleezy, in bad faith, and a gift to the giant corporate meat packers. I hope people see through it.

I feel like a ton of conservatives would actually be socialists if they had any idea what socialism actually was. Mostly they have only known the word as a synonym for ‘thing I don’t like,’ but I always find it striking how much socialist language conservatives use when they want to get their base on board with something. Even the introduction for project 2025 goes like: socialist idea, socialist idea, socialist idea, statement condemning socialism as the cause of the world’s problems, positive sounding authoritarian statement presented as a solution. Then it goes back to socialist statements to keep the reader engaged and feeling like the author is working in their best interest. It’s like some weird rope-a-dope bait and switch strategy.

I bet if socialism got a rebranding that stripped out all the language that usually triggers the conservatives, you’d see a lot of conservatives jump on board with it. At least until the billionaires spin up their media machines to destroy it again.

Maybe you need something like a motorized tie rack.

I mean, they deter people from having children go headfirst through the windshield.

To my understanding, she’s pretty reviled by boomers for being anti-war.

Depends on the boomer. Some people thought what she did was important and brave, but for the people who hate her it wasn’t just that she was anti-war. A ton of celebrities were anti-war. It was that she flew out to Vietnam, embedded with the North Vietnamese army, and filmed what a lot of people considered anti-American propaganda.

I used to work in a machine shop where a bunch of the old-timers were Vietnam vets. I made the mistake of talking about Barbarella one day, and ended up with an earful about “Hanoi Jane,” and her “crimes” against America. They absolutely despised her. For a long time after that they’d all take turns asking me how my communist girlfriend was doing.

I wonder if they’ll dust off the ol’ Twinkie defense.

“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” - Benito Mussolini

Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. Both the books and the radio shows.