Texas voting rights case update

Last Thursday, a federal judge in Texas threw out that state’s new voting ID requirements enshrined in the law SB 14, the strictest in the nation, on the grounds that it imposed undue hardship on voters, was discriminatory, and the costs involved amounted to a poll tax. It was a sweeping judgment that Texas immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is one of the most conservative of the Appeals Courts and on Tuesday, they reversed the judge’s ruling, allowing the rules to remain in place.
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Voter suppression efforts receive two setbacks

It has been clear for some time that, since their actual policies and practices are so unpopular with key demographics, the GOP strategy for winning elections is to try and reduce voting by likely Democratic voters by enacting strict voter ID laws under the pretext of preventing fraud, a problem that does not exist in any significant way to matter. But yesterday, these measures received two significant setbacks.
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The big secret

With all the stories about the police shooting of civilians, I was curious about how many people are killed each year this way. Samantha Bee of The Daily Show tries to get this number and, incredibly, finds that that this important piece of data does not exist, though they can tell you many bicycles are stolen.
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Killing the Messenger

When a mainstream media organization describes someone as their ‘national security reporter’, I immediately pigeonhole them as basically public relations flacks for the agencies they cover because often their main method of ‘news gathering’ is to cultivate sources at high levels within the agencies who will feed them self-serving leaks that these reporters then pass on to us. There are some good reporters on this beat, one being Jane Meyer for the New Yorker magazine and James Bamford who writes for a number of publications, but they tend to be the exception.
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Watermelon man

The incident of the intruder who recently managed to enter the White House before being captured was obvious fodder for the eternally panic-stricken to call for even more stringent security measures and the use of lethal force because that seems to be the only solution to any problem for those people. But it also provided a field day for humor and one has to merely scan through the collection of editorial cartoons around the nation to see that many cartoonists exploited this event for material. (See here and here for just two of the many cartoons I saw.)
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