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Posts Tagged ‘elections’

Elizabeth Warren proposes an “excessive lobbying tax” that would fund independent Congressional experts and public participation in policy

Elizabeth Warren has already proposed strict limits on lobbyists' activities, but in her latest policy proposal, she offers a way of hitting the most aggressive lobbyists in their pocketbooks, and using the revenue to strengthen Congress and the administrative agencies' independence from corporate influence while empowering members of the public to be heard ...

Zuckerberg: President Warren would “****” for Facebook

In July, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg held two hour-long internal employee meetings to discuss the business's future; The Verge obtained the recordings of those meetings, which reveal, among other things, that Zuckerberg dreads the possible election of Elizabeth Warren (Warren has pledged to break up Facebook and its Big Tech competitors if she becomes ...

Report from Defcon’s Voting Village reveals ongoing dismal state of US electronic voting machines

For three years now, cryptographer Matt Blaze (previously) and his colleagues have hosted a Voting Village at Defcon, the annual hacker con in Vegas, in which all comers are welcomed to try to compromise a variety of voting machines that are in actual use in American elections.

Every year, the results are terrifying ...

Bernie Sanders promises to zero out all US medical debt and end medical bankruptcies

Bernie Sanders has pledged to eliminate the $81b in outstanding US medical debt if he is elected president in 2020. Sanders says that this debt forgiveness will benefit 79 million Americans who are currently laboring under medical debt (this debt being the leading kind of debt reported to credit bureaux) and eliminate the leading cause ...

Hasan Minhaj roasts Justin Trudeau on climate hypocrisy

If Vladimir Putin didn't convince you that good pecs and hair do not qualify you to govern, I give you Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime ministerial princeling whose years in office have proven that there is no policy so progressive that he will not back it -- provided he never has to do anything to make ...

The case for allowing children to vote

Writing on Crooked Timber, John Quiggin (previously) responds to the epidemic of elderly reactionaries piling vitriol and violent rhetoric on the child activist Greta Thunberg and asks, why not let kids vote?

Quiggin points out that all the arguments against letting kids vote are also arguments for preventing older adults from voting: "Over 60 ...

Elizabeth Warren publishes a massive, detailed plan for addressing the injustice of US relations with indigenous American peoples

Even by Elizabeth Warren's high standards, her plan for "honoring and empowering tribal nations and indigenous peoples is detailed, ambitious, and important.

Warren's plan is a top-to-bottom reimagining of how the US relates to indigenous peoples: American Indians, Alaska natives and native Hawai'ians, from broadband plans to criminal justice reform to nation-to-nation treaty negotiations to ...

Judge orders the State of Georgia to be prepared for pen-and-paper balloting by March 2020

Few states have voting machines that are simultaneously more obviously defective and more ardently defended by the state government than Georgia, where 16-year-old touchscreen systems are prone to reporting ballots cast by 243% of the eligible voters and where gross irregularities in election administration sends voters to the wrong polling places or sends co-habitating ...

In California, the 2020 elections will feature an epic battle to allow cities to reinstate property taxes

In 1978, anti-taxation extremists managed to get a California ballot measure, Proposition 13, passed, and with it, they managed to effectively end the ability of cities to provide services to their residents, by capping property tax at 1% of their cash values, and limiting property tax increases to the lower of the annual inflation ...

The only path to victory in the Middle Earth election is to appeal to the moderate orc voter

David Howard, McSweeney's: "Let me tell you, it’s hard out here for an orc. We experience tremendous insecurity, not knowing whether we’ll have a job, or be able to raid peaceful villages, or if our friends will eat us. Sauron appeals to us economically challenged goblins because he offers us the chance of a ...