Politics-What's on your mind?

[A. Spectre]

Major US companies pledge to give employees time off to vote


Several major U.S. companies are pledging to give employees time off to vote in the November election, adding to a growing effort to help people vote while working on Election Day since it is not a federal holiday.

The Associated Press reports that a roster of large corporations including Starbucks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Apple, Twitter, Cisco, PayPal and Uber have all committed to allocating time for employees to vote.

For Walmart, this means allowing its 1.5 million employees up to three hours of paid leave to go vote. Similarly, Apple is offering its workers four hours off. Coca-Cola, Twitter, Cisco and Uber are letting employees take the day off entirely.

Starbucks said it will give is 200,000 employees flexibility on Election Day, and encourages them to plan ahead with managers to schedule time to vote or volunteer at polling places. The company also announced that its app will help customers learn how to register to vote.

“No American should have to choose between earning a paycheck and voting,” PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman said.

Giving employees a designated day off to vote is an idea that has been around since 1999, but has gained traction in recent years. The AP reported that 600 companies like Airbnb, Lyft and Paramount have partnered with ElectionDay.org, a nonprofit devoted to helping companies give employees information about voting, including obtaining mail-in ballots.

ElectionDay.org became active in 2018, and had 150 companies sign up. It now aims to secure 1,000 participating organizations by November 2020.

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Our voter turnout trails other developed countries. During the 2016 fiasco, only 56% turned out to vote. A tragedy in spades. The founding fathers at first only granted white, male property owners the right to vote, so the expansion of voting rights has taken some time.

Frankly, only women should be allowed to vote, look at the GD mess the men have gotten us into. President Obama said recently that women should take over, they would do a better job. He's right! (Most women, not all. There are some whack-a-doos)

I have had a hate/hate relationship with Wal-Mart. I wonder if I should rethink.

[Orema]

How Fake News Was Born by Heather Henderson


NBC NewsWire/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty

Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the author of Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line.

In the weeks leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley turned his town into a fortress. He sealed the manhole covers with tar, so protesters couldn’t hide in the sewers. He installed a fence topped with barbed wire around the Chicago International Amphitheater. He put the entire police force of 12,000 men on 12-hour shifts and called in over 5,000 National Guardsmen. About 1,000 Secret Service and FBI agents were also on duty, as the city braced for the 10,000 protesters who would soon arrive, wound up by a year of political assassinations, urban riots and the raging Vietnam War.

What could possibly go wrong?

With the whole world watching, the three major news networks brought the answer to that question into millions of Americans’ living rooms. They spared barely a second of the ensuing mayhem in their coverage—and in the course of doing so sparked a national debate about objectivity and journalistic integrity. The liberal-minded tuned in and saw textbook police brutality and “Gestapo tactics,” in the words of Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff. But millions of Middle Americans, the citizens Richard M. Nixon would later immortalize as the “silent majority,” saw an entirely different display of excess—on the part not of the police, but of the TV networks.

The Archie Bunkers of America, impassive to the hippies’ and yippies’ plight, saw them playing the newsmen like a fiddle, getting free publicity for their cause and, ultimately, getting what they deserved from the police. The protesters hurled profanities at the cops. They engaged in street theater, nominating a pig as the Democratic presidential candidate. They attempted to sleep in the parks (defying the 11 p.m. curfew) and to hold marches even though permits had been denied by the city. Allen Ginsberg even led the kids in chanting “Om.” The “establishment” response was swift and violent. As right-wing pundit Robert Novak later observed, “The demonstrators came looking for trouble and got what they wanted.” Viewed from that perspective, the 1968 Democratic convention was an inflection point for conservatives who would protest that the mainstream media was, in words that now echo from the White House, “the enemy of the people.”

The violence in Chicago was all-encompassing, and longhairs weren’t the only targets of what the federal government’s Walker Report later described as a “police riot” in the streets outside the convention. Delegates from the convention themselves—accountants in Brooks Brothers shirts, librarians with prim leatherette handbags—who wandered onto Michigan Avenue found themselves flying ass-over-tea-kettle through plate glass windows. Journalists with clearly displayed credentials were attacked, including, most notoriously, CBS’ Dan Rather.

Today, it’s taken for granted that much of our news coverage is slanted left or right, but in the network era there was still a deeply held belief that news could (and should) be completely neutral. The tumult of the 1960s tore apart that notion, even as many viewers struggled to hang onto it. We tend to think of the pre-Watergate era as an Edenic vista of trust and fidelity toward our institutions, especially the media—but the skepticism and stubborn partisan distrust that many feel today was present then, too. The real-time controversy and spin surrounding the shocking images that came from Chicago, many of them revisited here for the first time since August 1968, laid the foundation for the cries of “liberal bias” that hound and undermine the mainstream news media to this day.

This story is too long to republish in full on BFP. For the rest go to: https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...968-dnc-219627

[C0LLETTE]

Defunding the police: Ensuring that Police can be the last resort, not the first.

There are many situations in which only police can provide the peace, order and good government every Canadian wants, which is why all Canadians need to know they’re served by fair, impartial and unbiased officers.

But public safety is always about more than just police. As the Peel Principles of Policing put it, “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.”

Rethinking Canadian policing to make it so that police are not always the first call, but in many situations, the last resort? It’s a good idea.

[homoe]

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) pushed and voted for policies that benefited her husband’s consulting and lobbying business, positions Democrats are set to attack in what is quickly becoming one of the most contentious and expensive Senate races in the country.

Collins is in a tight race with Democratic state House Speaker Sara Gideon in a race Democrats almost certainly need to win to have a chance at taking back control of the U.S. Senate. The race, which has brought an unprecedented barrage of tens of millions of dollars worth of television advertising to Maine, has become increasingly nasty. Democrats and Republicans are now airing television ads attacking the husbands.

“Collins’ husband, a former lobbyist, profited off the opioid crisis,” the male narrator says in an ad from Duty and Honor, a Democratic nonprofit controlled by allies of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“She tried to raise her taxes, but her family didn’t pay their own taxes on time,” a female narrator says in an ad slamming Gideon, referring to tax liens levied against a condo project her husband invested in. The ad is from 1820 PAC, a super PAC whose largest donors are ultra-wealthy Wall Street executives.

The attacks highlight how the race has become the nastiest of Collins’ long career in politics and show how Democrats are prepared to turn even relatively routine, bipartisan elements of Collins’ four terms in the Senate into fodder for attack ads, arguing she has become an irredeemable creature of the Washington “swamp.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are desperate to find new points of attack on Gideon that could damage her image enough to persuade Maine voters to cast ballots for Collins even though they are likely to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who is almost certain to win the state.