Jonathan Mitchell, former Texas solicitor general and architect of Texas’s anti-abortion law, just filed a brief defending the same law. In it he makes two very disturbing statements, one of which gives away the game. Here is the first statement: “Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by…
Recall Redux
First a caveat: It will be a few weeks before the final numbers come in, but between the Secretary of State (SOS) and Associated Press we have a pretty good idea of what happened and how the votes will fall. While my comments take into consideration that we don’t have an official tally, there’s enough…
Total Bullshit: “Voter Fraud” & The Recall
Early this week, in Santa Barbara, Trump-Republican recall candidate Larry Elder asked his crowd, “How are we going to stop the Democrats’ cheating?”, followed by, “The number of people that are going to vote to recall this man is going to be so overwhelming so that even when they cheat, they’re still going to lose.”…
Yo Busta! Filabusta!
Recent events, particularly those in Texas, have brought the filibuster fight to the fore. So much so that a friend recently asked me, “What’s the downside to killing the filibuster?” I thought about it for a while and one thing I kept coming back to is that Americans might be familiar with the word filibuster…
Homicide
Crime statistics can be very useful in creating policy if one really understands them and does the work to dig past the basic numbers. Really, it is the same with all statistics. However, a long trend in day-to-day reporting in journalism is to present statistics as if they were a static, stand alone set of…
Refugees
Let’s talk about refugees. Right now, we have a refugee crisis. There are thousands of people who, through no fault of their own, are desperate to get to the United States. They are trying to escape violence and oppression, much of which impacts women. Men are also in danger, fearful of retaliation, of being snatched…
Shots
When the bus pulled into the US Coast Guard Training Center in Cape May, New Jersey, it was close to midnight. We stopped in front of a set of barracks and a fireplug of a man stepped onto the bus and started yelling at us. This was our company commander (CC), the Coast Guard’s name…
Unnecessary Delusions: Equality, Democracy, Obstruction
Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the Equality Act has hit a wall in the Senate. The bill – which would add LGBT folks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s list of people legally protected from discrimination – is supported by a strong majority of the population and is fairly uncontroversial; however, according to the…
Fun with Math: Behind the Numbers on Big Lie Believers (and more)
Time for some math! In a democracy, numbers are very, very important, especially in decision making. When a piece of legislation is introduced to the Senate, the House of Representatives, a state legislature, or a city or county council, it gets voted on. In some cases, the voting starts in a committee. If a majority…
Election 2020: Who voted & what that means
Monday morning and it is a fairly bleak news day, the kind that makes it easy to doubt our power and the possibility of change. I am not going to dive into the bleakness or take on each of today’s headlines. Instead, I am going a little deeper by giving you a slight preview of…