13 March 2016

Seven Sunday shorts

Can voting by mail violate the Voting Rights Act? Yes, say lawyers representing the Navaho Nation Human Rights Commission. They’ve filed a lawsuit to stop the practice in Utah. At In These Times, Stephanie Woodard has the story, and it’s a fascinating read.

Think twice before signing that online petition against the Creston water bottling project. It makes dubious claims and uses incendiary language:

“Rob” is hyperbole in this context, but if taken literally, it’s just not true. This is not a rogue project. Weaver is jumping through all the legal hoops. Making overheated claims about the project does not help. Neither does this video that I found on the petition’s page.

From Missoula, an in-the-trenches look at homelessness. That’s the title of Travis Mateer’s must-read article at The Last Best News. Take an extra Prozac before you start reading. Take a walk in bright sunshine after you finish. Then thank Mateer for his efforts to help the homeless, and for writing about his experiences. He’s stepping from direct involvement, at least for the present, but the problem of homelessness is always with us.

If the Republicans nominate Trump, most of the GOP establishment will support him. It’s in their economic self-interest, argues David Atkins at The Washington Monthly. I agree. A few Republicans will defect to the Democratic candidate, and a few more will neither write checks to nor vote for Trump, but most will hold their noses and support him.

Is Donald Trump the reincarnation of George Wallace or Benito Mussolini? At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall argues that Trump most resembles Wallace. At Salon, Fedja Buric argues that Mussolini is the best model for Trump. At the NY Times, Neil Irwin and Josh Katz report that Trump’s voters come from the regions where Wallace did well in 1968.

As a college student, I saw Wallace in action in 1968. Irwin’s and Katz’s finding doesn’t surprise me. Wallace denounced “pointy-headed” bureaucrats with briefcases, but I don’t recall that he explicitly blessed beating-up protesters. Trump does just that. Marco Rubio says Trump is behaving like a third world strongman. That’s close, but he’s also behaving like El Duce.

Salon’s website, incidentally, is one of the biggest CPU hogs on the internet. Be warned.

Leftists trying to keep Trump from speaking at his rallies are making a mistake. “On the activist left,” the Washington Post reported, “the shutdown of Trump’s Chicago rally was not a threat to free speech but an exercise of it, aimed specifically at rejecting hate speech.” Those who try to suppress what they consider hate speech do not have confidence that their own arguments have the power to refute Trump’s arguments. It’s a deeply paternalistic and authoritarian attitude. Zealots on the left can be just as authoritarian as zealots on the right.

An argument against Daylight Saving Time to which I can relate. I’m not an early morning person, unless I stay up all night. I like DST’s extra hour of light in the evening. Some do not, and while I don’t agree with them, I respect their opinion. But there’s one aspect of springing ahead and falling back that I detest: resetting my clocks, watches, and cameras. This year I must reset 12 of 13 devices. The exception is a 120-volt-AC LED clock that I left on DST. I might just leave everything on DST and mentally subtract an hour during the four and one-half months we’re condemned to MST.