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💯 Jasmine Crockett EXPOSES Russia's HOLD on the Republican Party!
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Mary Peltola's Congressional record: two knockouts, no losses.
For decades, it’s been unthinkable that Alaska could let a Democrat occupy its only seat in the House of Representatives, which had been held by the late GOP Rep. Don Young since 1972. But in the background, as Americans in the lower 48 were captivated by races in Georgia or Arizona, that’s exactly what’s happened: Alaskans voted 55-45 in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola, a former state legislator who just won her first full term over celebrity ex-Gov. Sarah Palin.
Peltola had just enough time to drop off her suitcase in Washington after winning the seat in an August special election. Palin was also her main opponent then, and in the months since, Peltola only grew her lead. She was helped in part by ranked-choice voting in its Alaska general-election debut. The system, which transfers votes to second-choice candidates when a voter’s first pick is eliminated, has drawn national attention and sometimes controversy.
Elections are a long affair in the 49th state, where challenges like distance, isolation, and tough weather abound, and mail-in ballots that are postmarked by election day have up until ten days to arrive for counting. The Alaska Division of Elections doesn’t count absentee, mail-in, and questioned ballots—many of which come from rural, predominantly Alaska Native regions—until after election day.
It’s not a system that benefits election-denying extremists like Palin, and Palin is not a good loser. The ex-governor has been hinting since polls closed that she’ll challenge the results of the race. She was sowing doubt and misinformation about ranked-choice voting as early as August, as I reported at the time:
“It’s bizarre, it’s convoluted, it’s confusing and it results in voter suppression,” Palin told the CPAC crowd. “It results in a lack of voter enthusiasm because it’s so weird.” None of that is true. Maine has been doing ranked-choice voting since 2016, and several cities and municipalities around the country have also adopted the system. “There isn’t a higher rate of incomplete or spoiled ballots in ranked choice races compared to ballots in elections using plurality voting,” Amy Fried, a professor of political science at the University of Maine, told Mother Jones. “Nor is turnout lower.” Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at the New York University School of Law, noted, “There’s no evidence voters have been confused or don’t understand how to rank candidates one, two, three.”
Palin was the first to sign her name last week to a citizens initiative that would overturn ranked choice voting.
For her part, Peltola has been frank that ranked-choice voting helped her, as she told Teen Vogue earlier this month: “I was very pleasantly surprised by the outcome. The timing was just right. [This new voting system] will help us get out of closed partisan primaries, which result in very extreme and sometimes fringe candidates winning.”
With Peltola’s win, Alaskans have demonstrated that being geographically disconnected from the rest of the country doesn’t mean they’re less connected to preserving democracy and abortion rights. Palin, who had the endorsement of Donald Trump, is an election conspiracist and proponent of misinformation. Peltola has openly supported codifying abortion rights into federal law—like her campaign slogan promises, she’ll be a “pro-choice, pro-fish” voice in Congress.
Snubbing King Charles’ coronation is Meghan Markle’s smartest move yet
“The thing that most people can’t get their heads around is that most people would do anything to be part of that elite circle. A good friend chided me about them. “Why can’t they just suck it up for all the money and parties?” And that’s what people find mind-boggling, especially about her. That she would get the golden ticket into a world of wealth, status and privilege and choose to walk away? Who does that?
Well, someone who is incredibly strong, knows her self-worth in terms of her mental health and boundaries and has the self-confidence to know she can make it on her own (with her family). I think that’s why so many people hate her. Because we’ve all had moments in our life where we wanted to be that person but couldn’t afford it, or needed the job, but dreamed of it. Many probably resent her because she had the means and the balls to do it.
She also had the courage and audacity to take on the most powerful establishments on the planet and call out bullying and toxic behaviour towards her. All this as the mixed race, American, divorcee from a more modest background. A woman who should have been grateful – not the person who took them on and left on her own terms and defiant. She was meant to disappear with shame, not carry on having a voice and agency over her life. She disrupted the fairy-tale narrative about being a princess and exposed it for what it really is – a lonely, subservient, controlled human mannequin. She also shone a harsh light on how the myth of the royal family struggles with real scrutiny in a modern, multicultural, changing world.
So once again, I salute her. She’s made the right call. For her mental health and for her family. Like the rest of us, she can enjoy it from the comfort of her very expensive, cream sofa with some good snacks.”
Opinion by Ayesha Hazarika
kessoku band - seishun complex
i'm not a guitar player but dark cramped places do sound nice
Carjacking and drug trafficking have become de facto legal, while simply breathing and living a happy life have now been criminalized.
Just a day after opposing incarceration during a period of record crime in the Twin Cities region, Walz announced, with the flick of his royal pen, a new edict criminalizing human socializing. Anyone caught socializing with someone not a part of their household — whether inside their home or in the open air outside — is subject to a $1,000 fine or 90 days in the jail cells that have been emptied of robbers and murderers. This is on top of reinstating all the previous lockdown policies from the spring.
Additionally, anyone caught "threatening" to gather or defy these royal edicts will be fined up to $25,000. Waltz has violated every clause of the Bill of Rights. In the process, he has also ignored the preamble of the Minnesota constitution, which begins, "We, the people of the state of Minnesota, grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty, and desiring to perpetuate its blessings and secure the same to ourselves and our posterity …"
With that thought in mind, now consider the following crime data. Homicides in Minneapolis are up 97%, aggravated assault up 26%, and carjackings are up 319%. According to the mayor, the city is dealing with a crisis of officers retiring at double the normal annual attrition rate. Clearly, under Walz's reimagining of criminal justice, only essential services, defined by violent crime, are allowed to take place on the streets.
When you think of communication back in the early 21st century, you probably think of it as the beginnings of the modern phone. But you may not realize that it’s also the origin point for many words and linguistic constructions that we’re still using now, 200 years later. I’ve been using the records at the Internet Archive to research the English of this fascinating historical era, and my research has led me to believe that we should take a more relaxed and curious attitude toward our own language changes in the 23rd century. For example, did you know that there was a period between the 17th and the 20th centuries when English didn’t make a distinction between formal and informal ways of addressing someone? Shakespeare distinguished between formal “you” and informal “thou,” but our presentday distinction between formal “you” and informal “u” dates back only to the beginning of the internet age. How could people of this unfortunate era have had a true understanding of the Bard when they had no way to fully grasp the intimacy of the sonnets (“shall i compare u to a summer’s day / u are more lovely and more temperate”)? [...] So you’d imagine that early-21st-century people would have been really excited about this fascinating era that they were living in, right? In my research, I came across so many doommongering quotes about how texting was ruining the English language, when we obviously now know it as a cultural renaissance in writing that ushered in the new genre of the textolary novel and other kinds of microfiction, not to mention creating now-classic nonfiction formats like the thread. (I drafted this op-ed as a thread myself, as any sensible writer would do, because how else would I stresstest each of my sentences to make sure they were all pithy and vital?) As ridiculous as the fears of the past seem, when I read them, I found myself seeing with new light the fears of the present. We’ve all heard the complaints about how the youths are communicating these days — many of us even have complained about it ourselves. But what will the people of the 25th century think, looking back at our 23rd-century rants about kids refusing to say “no worries” in response to “thank you?” Won’t they be totally accustomed to hearing “it’s nothing” or its even more reviled short form “snothin” by then? [...] How arrogant of us to think that, amid all of the possible eras of the English language, it somehow peaked exactly one generation ago, in the 22nd century. How foolish the critics of those bygone years look in their disdain for their own century and reverence for the 20th or the 21st. How clear it is, from the perspective of history, that when we mythologize the English of a previous age, all we’re doing is creating a moving target that we can never quite hit. We can break this cycle. We don’t have to wait until the 23rd century passes into history before we start appreciating its linguistic innovations. We don’t have to use language as a tool for demonstrating intellectual superiority when we could be using it as a way of connecting with each other.
Gretchen McCulloch, How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years
Part of the New York Times Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 50 or even 200 years from now.
Rachel Maddow shares reporting from Politico of Republicans in Michigan and Arizona creating fake elector letters pretending to certify Dona
Rachel Maddow shares reporting from Politico of Republicans in Michigan and Arizona creating fake elector letters pretending to certify Donald Trump and Mike Pence the winners of their states even though Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won them both, with the Michigan letter markedly similar to a previously reported forged Wisconsin letter.
Groups of Republicans in three states signed their names to forged documents, pretended they were real, and sent them to government agencies
Wisconsin Republicans did not respond well to the state's election results in November 2020, when Donald Trump narrowly lost the state. In fact, after the state Supreme Court affirmed President Joe Biden's victory in Wisconsin, and it came time for state officials to complete the process, some Republicans went in an especially ridiculous direction.
It was on Dec. 14, 2020, when Wisconsin electors met in the state capitol for an official ceremony in which the state formally assigned its electors for the electoral college. There wasn't anything unusual about this: On the same day, every state did this, with Trump electors being assigned in states won by the GOP ticket, and Biden electors being assigned in states won by the Democratic ticket.
But as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, the process in the Badger State became a little messier: While the actual electors were being assigned inside the state capitol in Madison, a group of Wisconsin Republicans quietly held a separate, fake ceremony — in the same capitol, at the same time — to cast electoral votes for Trump, despite his defeat in the state.
They then proceeded to forge the official paperwork and sent it to, among others, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Archivist, as if the materials were legitimate. They were not.
As Rachel noted on last night's show, that's an important controversy in its own right, but what w e didn't know until yesterday was that Wisconsin wasn't alone.
Politico reported:
"As Trump's team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents."
I have three questions.
First, were these efforts legal? Groups of Republicans in three states signed their names to forged documents, pretended they were real, and sent them to government agencies. I'm not an attorney and can't speak with any authority on whether this constituted fraud, but I'll be eager to learn what legal experts have to say about the schemes.
Second, did these GOP groups have any outside help? The materials out of Wisconsin and Michigan, for example, were practically identical, with matching formatting and fonts. Was this an amazing coincidence or was there some kind of behind-the-scenes coordination? If so, who played an organizing role?
And third, exactly how many states featured pro-Trump Republicans creating forged election materials? We previously knew of one; now we know of three.
Trump lost 25 states in 2020. How many of them included election opponents willing to send fake documents to government offices?
