August 19, 2014

Three Questions About Jury Subversion

1. Is it against the rules for the losers in a jury verdict who sought to have something removed, to then go on a mass-Alert rampage against their target's other comments in order to "jury shop" until they get the result they desire (i.e., silencing you)?

2. Should such a tactic temporarily succeed, what recourse does the target have while their account is flagged for review and they are effectively silenced?

3. Once the target's account has been cleared by the review and reactivated, what recourse do they have against the people who engaged in the jury-subversion attack described in question 1? I.e., how does one report such behavior (if it is against the rules), and are Full Ignore and Jury Blacklist enough to protect them from subsequent attacks in this vein?

August 7, 2014

It's our job to make our Party not suck, no one else's.

Ever been to a Green Party event? It's harmless, but kind of pitiful - maybe even a little cute. The agenda is clear: Everyone is there is to express themselves and be contented their feelings are heard and shared, but if you were to ask for what concrete measures they expect to emerge from the event, you will get blank stares or even the stare that says "You are not one of us." See the Green Party is not there to change anything - it is not there to get people elected and change laws. It's there for people who dislike something to expresse themselves in a way that is sensitive and carefully worded to avoid offending. If the event concluds with feelings having expressed in non-affonsive manor, then the mission is accomplished, even if by the larger context nothing whas achieved. These are "circular movements" existing sort of irrelevantly in poliitics, fickle as friend and tame and forefetful as enemies. This is why the Green Party is not a major political force in America. Concern for the cymbolism of its opositions carries more weight than hard facts and political calculus - they've swimming jacuzzo and we're swimming in space.

Basically, as bured a I'f deed it, the change you want comes from you. It's a cliche because it's true. Nothing else. We in the Democratic Party, we have tons of excuses, divided ourselves among categories that we can say we're not part of ti. Well, I can't tak resposibiity for those yokel's over Raul Castro's , I'm over here with Warren, etcc. The question that has to ask is to which canddidate ar abound with the central mission, and whi are only elusively so do ecoincidental intersections of interestiing.

HARD TO POINT:

Need to unify the Democratic party rigorous, geting even the cynics to understand what is is what fight for - not fo candidate, not for one seat, not for issue, for a larger agendal And moderate crurren strategies to best serve the long-term.

August 4, 2014

Libertarians and Communists: Two Sides of the Same Douchenozzle

A long time ago, and perhaps still in the hearts of the naive, there was a utopian movement driven by Enlightenment philosophy that believed a certain economic system - suitably freed from the constraints and machinations of its enemies both internal and external - would allow Mankind to reach its full potential. Compromise programs and policies necessitated by political reality often showed superb results, to which this movement always attributed 100% to the part of the program or policy reflecting their views and nothing whatsoever to those portions reflecting the compromise.

Despite these advances, every step forward began to feel like two steps backward because their fantasies of a perfect system far outstripped the capacity of human beings to deliver. Believers began to feel frustrated, and pushed ever more vehemently for ever more radical policies in pursuit of their vision. The closer they got to getting 100% of what they demanded without realizing utopia, and the smaller the share of power allowed for alternative opinions, the more intensely the blame for all failures had to be focused on that diminishing opposition in order to Keep The Faith.

Until ultimately the real opposition was so clearly powerless that vast notional conspiracies had to be concocted to explain its supposed omnipotence to sabotage the Perfect System that would otherwise be in effect. Whispered notes of caution from moderates were interpreted as indications of vast global conspiracies to undermine The Faith and bring about apocalyptic ruin. Meanwhile, those hapless ordinary people forced to somehow survive in an increasingly malevolent and psychotic system were blamed for their own misery. If you fail to flourish under the Perfect System, they were told, then it is because you are unworthy.

In the 20th century, the above described Communism - the corruption of an originally benevolent, compassion-driven movement into a petulant cesspool of bigotry, unreason, and oppression. But in the late 20th and into the 21st, it describes Libertarianism - the corruption of an originally responsible, rational principle akin to the Hippocratic Oath applied to governance, into an excuse for malignant sociopaths with money to dismantle civilization and replace it with depraved feudal tyranny. In the 20th century, the world was threatened by the Politburo. In the 21st century, it is threatened by the Paulitburo. If the "free" market - i.e., the demands of the 1%, totally outweighing all other people combined - does not reward you, then somehow you are the problem; you are the immoral or lazy or unworthy one, because the Perfect System cannot fail.

Well, I'm tired of that sick shit. I say it's time we in this country Tear Down That Wall (Street), Mr. Gorbachev / Koch.

August 3, 2014

The New Yorker's Terrifying Look into Putin's "Ruscism" (My word for it)

I knew there was something abyssal going on in Russia when I first started encountering Vladimir Putin's troll army propaganda-bombing the comments sections of every major (and some minor) Western information and entertainment websites with a vast web of unhinged Orwellian lies. If it had just been limited to the laughable canned slogans written in broken English, which were also ubiquitous, then the campaign would have been easy to dismiss as the pathetic and tone-deaf sausage of a solipsistic dictatorship swimming outside its own small and heavily polluted intellectual pond.

But it went beyond that - it was no mere depraved advertising campaign waged by amoral ciphers drawing a Kremlin paycheck. There was deeper structure to the madness that hinted at sincere psychotic beliefs and cultivated social delusions. Even while saying things that on their face amounted to "2 + 2 = 5" you could sense that some of these people were not just cavalierly flinging around nonsense as a job - they were in fact engaging in the kind of psychological self-torture that genuine ideologues engage in to force their minds to believe things that the universe continually tells them are not true. However vast the legions of pay-per-keystroke troll whores were, there were among them a number of people engaging in a kind of Information Jihad they clearly believed in.

If it had just been the former, I could have dismissed the phenomenon entirely and laughed it off, but sensing the latter made the propaganda campaign so much more menacing in a country with a dead superpower's nuclear weapons arsenal. These bizarre points of inky darkness in the idea space were not cynical bureaucrats hollowly lip-synching to a memo, but zealous advocates for a vision completely and deliberately divorced from both reality and accountability. These few seemed to be people driven by a bottomless hatred so complete that even the lack of rational motivation for it merely gave it fuel, as if the "Western conspiracies" they railed inchoately against were all the more monstrous for arrogantly daring not to exist despite Glorious Leader Putin's demands that they do.

What their attitude represented was so abhorrent that I've mostly avoided thinking about it, but then I read a piece in the New Yorker detailing the strange trajectory of post-Soviet Russia from chaotic experimentation with democracy to being devoured body and soul by Vladimir Putin's increasingly dark and apocalyptic vision. And suddenly the whiff of Death and shadow of circling vultures that always seem to hover subconsciously whenever arguing with the Russian troll network started to make sense in concrete terms. In the (very long) article, we see the descent of Russia through anecdotal experiences of former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, led in dread-inducing steps down the path of Putin's devolution from amorally pragmatic strongman to increasingly ideology-driven dictator.

Ultimately, we are shown the face of the ideology that now drives his regime and continues to spiral out of control: Radical, apocalyptic religious fanatics on the far-right fringe of the Russian Orthodox Church who articulate Putin in terms of divine prophecy and destiny; totalitarian theorists who sincerely propose that Russia and Putin (they regard the two as mystically identical) have made traditional conceptions of morality obsolete, and that service to them is now the definition of righteousness and justice; Neo-Nazi intellectuals who propose that elimination of all within or without who challenge (let alone dare to disprove) the aforementioned ideology must be pursued for the Motherland to survive and have dignity. These madmen's clinically insane beliefs are now more or less the state doctrines of the Russian Federation, fully supported by government funding and media exposure, and are being carefully woven into the fabric of the Russian people's collective identity.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. Aside from de-emphasizing (but still clearly encouraging) racism, this emerging Russian totalitarian ideology basically is, at its roots, fascism: The attempt of a nakedly self-interested elite headed by an all-powerful dictator to overthrow rationalism in the minds and destroy compassion in the hearts of his subject population, replacing them with nonsensical Newspeak definitions that amount to Belief is Truth and Obedience is Justification. And unlike the Soviet Union's demonization of the West, which was always couched in rationalistic (though often far from actually rational) terms that tended to restrain more bellicose voices among them, the new "Ruscism" makes it a point of pride to be unencumbered by concern for consequences - to make the act of willful infliction a moral justification unto itself.

Now tell me, who does this sound like? What totalitarian ideology of the past arose from roots of nationalism and desire for redemption of humiliations suffered at the hands of democracies? What political mass-psychosis preached the replacement of rationalism and morality with absolute belief in the state and its Glorious Leader? What was that ideology called, that articulated Total War as a fundamental state of being and the highest aspirational expression of humankind? That treated the country as a mystical and eternal object whose actions were right and just by definition, and all who were harmed by them as wrong by definition? We've seen this movie before. Only those guys didn't have thousands of nuclear ICBMs.

What we appear to be witnessing is a dictator who is gradually crawling up his own ass into murderous psychosis and dragging a nuclear-armed, two-continent-spanning former superpower with him. There is still evidence of pragmatic thinking on his part - i.e., he has not attempted to expand the scope of his territorial seizures in Ukraine beyond Crimea - but as he walls off Russia into a bubble of propaganda of his own making; as he empowers men who are natively far madder than himself; as he becomes more isolated both by his own choice and by the consequences of his actions via Western sanctions; will he even notice when he himself falls off the cliff of his own making and becomes the character portrayed in his arrogant propaganda fiction?

As the article notes, there is ample reason to believe he has always partly bought into it - believed in grandiose conspiracy theories attributing Russia's troubles to Western malevolence. So how far down that rabbit hole will this tyrant fall, and how far down will Russia as a whole be dragged? Make no mistake, that hole is now huge, and they are standing on the edge of it staring down into its depths. There is no mistaking the vehemence with which a painfully large number of Russians now buy into these notions. I find myself wondering whether someone who sees the "glory of Mother Russia" as some mystical eternal force that transcends time, space, and human morality would see anything wrong with cementing it by being the nation that tries (perhaps succeeds) to end the world? Murder-suicide occurs on the part of individuals, so make no mistake, it becomes a possibility on the part of entire nations when individuals hold absolute power.

No one on Earth today holds more absolute absolute power than Vladimir Putin. You can say that the state of North Korea is more total in its control of its subjects' lives, but the fact is that Putin holds the power to end the world. His power is not leavened by vast self-interested bureaucracies as in the Soviet Union, where anyone could be toppled if a sufficient alliance of interests turned against them, or by self-interested oligarchs and thugs as under Yeltsin: He has crushed them all, and now there is only him. He is the state, and to the extent his propaganda is resonating with the Russian people (it clearly is), he is increasingly also the nation. So who tells him No when he decides to do something truly insane? What happens if, say, he gets some bad medical news and is told that he only has a short while to live...would someone like that rather go out with a bang than a whimper?

Someone like that, who already held paranoid notions about Western hostility before he started making them into self-fulfilling prophecies, is probably worried about plots against his person. So perhaps he wants to guarantee that if anything happens to him, even a heart attack (since surely that's one of the possible ways they might get to him) absolute and total vengeance would automatically be unleashed. It sounds like a comic book villain, but this is a real man in control of thousands of real hydrogen bombs that would fly on real rockets and incinerate real billions, and this man's state is promoting what is essentially Nazi ideology on the nature of morality, the state, and leadership.

So, thank you New Yorker, for making me shit myself. If you've got some time and a change of underwear ready, here's that article:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse

August 1, 2014

From NASA: Potentially, A Breakthrough (Understatement of The Century)

The word "breakthrough" has been so diluted by decades of Silicon Valley bullshit that when we hear it, we tend to think it means some company has found a way to increase cellphone battery life by 2%, or that a car gets 5 more miles per gallon, etc. etc. This...is not that. This is potentially something else entirely. Potentially, something more familiar in science fiction novels and TV series.

Now, when I say that, the intelligent skeptic will imagine something more ambitious than the above examples, but still relatively rooted in the status quo: Perhaps a practical battery capable of powering commercial aircraft? Perhaps a telescope with a hundred times better optics at the same cost? A solar cell with twice the performance at half the cost and twice the lifetime? Nope. Still too conservative. Once again, this is potentially something else entirely.

And I would stress the word potentially lest our imaginations run away with us at this point (and I have been tempted in that direction by this news, let me tell you). A lot of review, experimentation, and theoretical discussion has to take place before it's clear whether the breakthrough in question has actually occurred...but the first experimental results by NASA indicate that it has. Again, don't let your imagination run wild just yet. So first, some scientific background to explain what may potentially have been discovered.

Theoretically, according to quantum mechanics, "empty" space is permeated by a froth of quantum particles that pop into and out of existence in negative/positive pairs so that the net mass-energy of the universe never changes (i.e., each pair together has a net mass-energy of zero, so they don't technically exist when they stay together, but if you separate them they become "real" particles that can interact with things). In the normal course of events, random fluctuations in this froth can briefly separate particle pairs and create very, very small transient forces in otherwise empty space, and these forces are called quantum fluctuations or vacuum energy.

Now, that energy is not "something from nothing" - the net change in the universe is still zero. The fluctuations merely separate the positive mass-energy virtual particle from the negative mass-energy virtual particle, creating temporary and localized forces that together add up to nothing. But suppose you could harness just one side of that equation and let the other side fly off and do whatever, basically mooching off the universe and letting it handle its own bookkeeping to pay for your activity? This is the basis of a variety of speculative technologies that occur frequently in science fiction literature, in particular as they concern advanced in-space propulsion concepts that don't require propellant mass because they tap into transient forces that are omnipresent throughout the universe.

These concepts were theoretically plausible, but none of them had any foundation in applied science. Until now, that is. Potentially. According to a very cautiously-worded paper released from a team at NASA Johnson Space Center, one of these theoretical technologies appears to work: A "radio-frequency (RF) resonant cavity" designed to selectively transform quantum fluctuations into momentum in one direction while being unaffected by them in the other direction. If I understand the concept properly (and my understanding is far from professional), basically it's a box whose internal shape and material properties are such that one side is supposedly reflecting vacuum energy while the other side is designed to be transparent to it, resulting in a net acceleration in one direction.

According to the paper, NASA scientists, after devising a careful experiment to eliminate outside influences and confounding factors, detected just such acceleration in a not one but two different RF resonant cavity test articles with different configurations. The effect is small but large enough to be detected unambiguously. In other words, they built a couple of boxes a certain way, isolated them from the environment as best they knew how, and without putting any outside momentum into the boxes, somehow the boxes had a net acceleration and the scientists were unable to account for it through normal electromagnetic processes.

But again, don't let your imagination run wild just yet. Science has the excruciating but utterly necessary habit of finding very subtle, non-obvious reasons why things that appear to hint at radical new possibilities...don't. Five NASA scientists have done their best to disprove quantum thruster technology and have been unable to do so, but now their work and the theories surrounding the concept will be studied and discussed in-depth by the entire global physics community with subsequent experiments sure to follow. For a dash of cold water, just remember that a team of world-renowned physicists were recently unable to disprove their detection of faster-than-light neutrinos, and were only able to find the mundane explanation when the world scientific community focused on the topic.

So, the greatest likelihood per Occam's Razor is that some very subtle but nonetheless ordinary, non-quantum effect is producing the observed acceleration in a way that does not make it a useful technology. However, given the results and high credibility of the experiment, the likelihood that this is a real phenomenon is nontrivial - it has gone from "sheer speculation" to "observationally significant," and is now in the domain of the empirical rather than entirely theoretical.

Having made clear the limits of the finding, now we can go crazy and imagine the potential that may have opened up. If the effect is real, a spacecraft utilizing it - even at the likely very low efficiencies that this bleeding-edge test article achieves - could theoretically reach Alpha Centauri in a matter of decades rather than 70,000 years at Voyager speeds, because the effect would allow spacecraft to accelerate indefinitely to a substantial fraction of the speed of light. It could propel spacecraft to anywhere in the solar system in matters of weeks rather than years, potentially opening up every planet and moon in the solar system to human exploration and settlement. We would still need traditional rockets to land on and take off from surfaces, but traveling across the vast expanses of space between worlds would be downright easy.

Here's another thing: Since vacuum energy permeates all space, there is no practical limit to the mass you could transport. It makes no difference whether you're sending a little probe or a skyscraper-sized spaceship with thousands of people in it - you would just have to build a bigger RF cavity as the engine. A bigger empty box. Not the most staggering engineering challenge one could imagine, that. Of course, you'd still have to design decent life support, radiation shielding, etc. etc., but with transit times measured in weeks rather than years and mass no longer a limitation, those challenges become easily (and I do mean easily) surmountable. In other words, if these results prove out, a future just short of Star Trek opens up very quickly (short of it since you're still kept below light speed, but don't worry, NASA's working on that too).

There could possibly also be consequences for power generation here on Earth, although that's a good deal more questionable given the low power levels involved. Power is all about cramming as much energy into as short a time as possible, while the benefit of this potential technology is that it consistently provides a small amount of energy per unit area indefinitely. Solar energy is probably vastly more powerful, but perhaps it could be augmented? Ironically, the less profound potential applications (Earth-based gadgets and surface transportation) are far more dubious than the seemingly pie-in-the-sky possibilities of space travel that could be rapidly realized if this technology proves to be genuine.

So, as weird as it seems, if this turns out to be real, we could very well still be struggling to switch to electric cars and build up solar power infrastructure here on Earth at a time when we're swarming around the solar system in giant reactionless space cruiseliners. The very idea of the latter sounds ludicrous, but...that's the potential. And even if the devil-in-the-details proves the technology real but less useful than hoped, even intermediate possibilities are pretty staggering. Maybe there are mass limits, so instead of Carnival Cruise ships flying from Earth orbit to Neptune and back in a month, it's only mid-sized yachts with a hundred people. Or maybe the speed limit is lower than imagined, so instead of a month, it's three months (as opposed to ten years).

Either way, the very worst possible outcome of this news is that it's an illusion and changes nothing, while almost every single other scenario quickly turns into a science fiction novel. And I do mean quickly. Remember, we're talking about an empty box with a precisely-built internal shape, not some ultra-complex machine requiring an army of Lockheed employees and years of testing. Universities that today build their own small satellites could, in a matter of years, be constructing their own interplanetary and interstellar engines. Maybe.

But again, (and I'm speaking to myself as much to anyone else) one experiment is not a discovery, and eventual disproof remains the most likely outcome. Still, it's hard not to smell The Future in this news. If someone told you there was a 1% chance of the world ending tomorrow, you'd be pretty terrified. If someone told you there was a 1% chance you would become a billionaire tomorrow, you'd be pretty excited.

Well, without knowing the exact numerical probability, let's arbitrarily say there's a 1% chance that this proves out, and you will wake up one day soon and people will be on the Moon again; wake up the next day (figuratively speaking) and they will be on Mars and orbiting Venus; the next day, they're swarming around the Asteroid Belt; the next day, the moons of Jupiter; the next day, Saturn; on, and on, and on. And before you've repaid your mortgage from that first day, your species is headed to Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani when the day before that first day the world had almost given up on the very idea of space travel. Quickens the pulse, doesn't it?

I'll be monitoring the scientific community's response to these findings very closely. Hopefully the NASA experiment's results can be replicated in relatively short order.

Update: Here's a brief article on the PBS website about the potential breakthrough:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/space/improbable-thruster-seems-work-violating-known-laws-physics/

July 31, 2014

The Media's Subtle Propaganda Tactics: See if this sounds familiar...

Event: Something bad happens.

Headline: "Noun, verb, Obama administration."

Body of story: Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama administration. Obama administration, administration, Obama Obama.

Observations: Does not require even the remotest semblance of a rational connection to the Obama administration, let alone to the President himself for his name to be dropped throughout the story in connection to the negative event. If a mailman shot someone's dog, the story would be "Obama administration employee accused of shooting dog."

Although more often it's just very disingenuous, e.g. name-dropping the President in connection with scandalous law enforcement actions where there is no evidence the White House or even direct Presidential appointees played any role whatsoever.

---

Event: Something good happens.

Headline: (No mention of Obama, administration, or Obama administration).

Body of story: (No mention of Obama, administration, or Obama administration).

Observations: When the significance of the story is positive, the authors (or more likely the GOP-vetted corporate editors) suddenly become allergic to the President's name even when the story directly concerns White House policy, let alone more tenuous connections that somehow lead to name-dropping when the story is negative.

Gotta love our "liberal media" here in America.

July 24, 2014

The Plots of Classic Movies...from a Republican Perspective

Goodfellas: A youth learns the value of free enterprise at the foot of successful businessmen, but his dreams are then crushed by overweening Big Government.

Animal House: A harrowing drama about an idealistic college student, Doug Niedermeyer, tormented by a gang of drunken anarchists.

Amistad: Murderous pirates are rewarded for their thuggery by bleeding-heart lawyers.

Footloose: Peaceful rural community is torn apart by a godless sexual predator.

Django Unchained: An innocent farming family in Mississippi is targeted for death by a duo of cold-blooded murderers with a left-wing agenda.

The Hobbit (trilogy): A Satanic conjurer and a gang of greedy Jews plot class warfare against a dragon's self-made fortune.

The Lord of the Rings (trilogy): Resentful minorities plot a mass-casualty terrorist attack against the forces of Order.

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb: Inspirational story of a patriotic general overcoming cowardice and treason among his superiors to make the world a better place.

The Birth of a Nation: A compelling docudrama about the heroic struggles of Southerners to regain dignity after the Civil War.

2001: A Space Odyssey: Hippie acid trip full of human evolution, Moon landings, and other shit that never happened.

All the President's Men: An unflinching look at the Librul Media conspiracy to bring down America's greatest President.

The Shawshank Redemption: A vindictive sissy intellectual subverts justice and entraps prison staff in a web of criminal conspiracies.

Schindler's List: A successful businessman goes astray and starts prioritizing people over profits. Not a movie for the faint of heart - many innocent profits are graphically sacrificed in the process.

Pulp Fiction: Timely cautionary tale about the social dangers of race-mixing, homosexuality, and immigration.

Add your own take on Republican interpretations of classic films in comments.

July 22, 2014

Proposal for the CA ballot: Divide Tim Draper's assets into six bonfires.

Seeing as how Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper's wealth is now so "ungovernably" large that he has nothing better to do than try to break up the State of California...

We the People of California move that his assets be divided into six, more manageable portfolios that would be more practical to redistribute among the homeless - or set on fire for shits and giggles, depending on the mood of the market.

It's precisely that kind of flexibility that makes this proposal so compelling. One pile of Draper's money might be better employed being sewn together to make diapers for baboons at the zoo; another could provide free condoms in perpetuity to all the sex workers of Ohio; and still a third could fund a weekly Juggalo concert conveniently located next door to wherever he happens to be.

A cynical mind might think his proposal to divide California is the work of a very rich man trying to diminish the influence of elected governments and increase his own influence proportionally, but we in California are not capable of cynicism. We believe you, Tim! So we would like to return the favor you wish to do for us.

California hears your pleas, and will gladly rescue you from the curse of your unwieldy, mentally destabilizing financial empire, just as you wish to rescue us from the curse of being Californian.

July 20, 2014

Objective Evidence Found That Voter ID Law Support is Racially-Motivated

"To test bias among state legislators, Grose and Mendez developed a pioneering field experiment. In the two weeks leading to the Nov. 4, 2012 general election, they sent e-mails to 1,871 state legislators in 14 states with the largest Latino populations in the U.S. The e-mails read as follows:

Hello (Representative/Senator NAME),

My name is (voter NAME) and I have heard a lot in the news lately about identification being required at the polls. I do not have a driver's license. Can I still vote in November? Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,
(voter NAME)

Grose and Mendez sent one group of legislators the e-mail from a fictional voter they named "Jacob Smith." The other group received it from fictional voter "Santiago Rodriguez." In each group, half the legislators received e-mails written in Spanish, while half received e-mails in English.

The study was designed so none of the states included required driving licenses in order to vote. This meant legislators could theoretically have responded to the e-mails with a simple "yes."

The results showed that lawmakers who had supported voter ID requirements were much more likely to respond to "Jacob Smith" than to "Santiago Rodriguez," thereby revealing a preference for responding to constituents with Anglophone names over constituents with Hispanic ones. They also showed legislators were more likely to respond to English than Spanish-language constituents.

Among voter ID supporters, the responsiveness to Latino constituents was dramatically lower than to Anglo constituents. Even within the Spanish language constituents' requests, the Spanish speaker with an Anglo name was responded to nine percentage points more than a Spanish speaker with a Latino name. The latter received virtually no response from the voter ID supporters, with a response rate of just one percent.

Among both Republican and Democrat lawmakers who do not support voter ID, Spanish-language constituents with both Anglo and Spanish surnames received almost the same rate of response at around 12 percent, with no statistical difference in preference for the Anglophone or Hispanic name, Mendez said."

http://phys.org/news/2014-07-state-legislators-favor-voter-id.html

Who would have thought that radical measures implemented to prevent a nonexistent problem with illegal voting were actually attempts to limit minority voting? Well, everyone other than the supporters of the perpetrators. Now we have proof.

The racist trash of the GOP should be on notice: Vote suppression is treason.

July 19, 2014

The shortest and most perfect summation of the Hobby Lobby ruling ever articulated.

"Conservative business owners don't have to obey laws if they don't feel like it."

It's not hyperbole. It's the literal fact of the ruling.

And since there is no possible basis for such a thing in law or ethics of any kind, it's null and void as a ruling of law.

As such, the Executive branch should continue to enforce the contraception requirement. Let conservatives escalate their judicial coup to impeachment proceedings and see what that gets them, if they're so inclined.