Attention Pennsylvania voters!

Senator Bob Casey’s race is now at a margin of 0.53%.

An automatic recount in PA is triggered with a margin of 0.5%. That’s a difference of 0.03% or a little over 2,000 votes. We need to make sure every ballot is counted here, and there’s thousands of uncounted ballots right now due to voter error.

Did you mail in a ballot? Check to see it was accepted here:

If it says anything other than accepted/counted/etc, your ballot needs your attention. A mistake in filling it out means that your ballot will not count unless you “cure” it. Check your county’s curing policies:

See full instructions for curing by county here.

You have until November 12 to cure your ballot in PA.

Do you know someone who mailed in a PA ballot? Please pass these links on to them. You may be the difference between their vote counting or not in a super close race.

Everyone else, you can help PA voters cure their ballots. If you live in Pennsylvania, you can help canvass in your county (see links in this thread). If you are in another state, you can sign up to call voters and help them cure by phone.

Want to help another state? Sign up for a shift through November 19.

Whatever happens, two things remain true: 1. Trump might be distancing himself from Project 2025, but his Agenda 47, which is on his website, is basically the same thing. 2. Third party voting is useless without ranked choice voting; it's mathematically impossible to elect a third party candidate. DO NOT SPLIT THE VOTE.

Splitting the vote is what got him the white house in 2016. Russians helped with propaganda here and on social media. This has been proven.

Anyone discouraging you from voting is actively trying to suppress your vote. Don't fall for that shit.

Not voting is not boycotting. Boycotting requires preventing income, like boycotting businesses because they support Israel. Voting is your power, and by not using it you are giving up your power.

Republicans ALWAYS vote. They know if democrats always vote, there will be no republican wins, so they do whatever it takes to keep democrats from winning. That means removing people from the voting registry, reducing the number and places to vote, removing and reducing rhe number of ballot dropboxes, fake ballot dropboxes, propaganda, and even violence.

Vote blue! Yeah, no matter who. All the way down the ballot.

My dream for the election is that it’s definitive. I want a 2012-style Election Day where everyone built it up beforehand to possibly be close but then the results start rolling in and it was like “Oh, nevermind. It’s obviously Obama. Everyone go to bed.”

I just want voters to put a stake right through the heart of Trumpism so that it crumbles to ash before our eyes. That’s the dream.

like to charge, reblog to cast

How to make this happen: CLICK HERE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MOST CONVENIENTLY VOTE IN YOUR STATE! Make a plan and VOTE!

One of the reasons we need to drive up the margins is to make it harder for Trump and his allies to dispute the election - and we need to do this in terms of popular vote as well, and counts in safe blue or red states (especially as there's evidence that the national polls are close more due to Trump doing better than usual in safe states, while Harris is leading in most of the swing states - and the Trump campaign is so unhinged they think they can win California now). Which is to say, wherever you live in the U.S., vote for Harris. Vote blue. This is not a year to play with your vote. It never is - voting third party, unless your state does ranked-choice voting, is a bad idea mathematically anyway - but especially not this one. We need to make sure Trump is trounced as hard as possible, and that means that even in "safe" states, every vote matters.

When generals break cover...listen to them

Take it from someone who has done progressive activism in real, not-just-online ways and also knows a ton of people for whom that's like, their job, and has also lived in red, purple and blue states (Texas, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts): activism is much, much harder to do in places where the law and the politicians are actively hostile to your politics. As such, it is not a replacement for voting. You have to vote. You shouldn't just vote, but you should vote and do the other things. This is why everyone who is actually serious about activism that actually does stuff is telling you to vote.

I get really frustrated by the argument on Tumblr of "voting is just one step, it's not the only thing you can do!" because I can never tell if that person is saying "your activist credentials aren't hurt by voting, you can still do all those other things!" - which is true! and good! and some people need to hear it! - or "it's just one of many types of activism that you can do, it's one option" - BAD. It is not. It is the foundational step. You can't really do all that other stuff, or can't do it as well and as effectively, if you don't have the infrastructure in place that you create by voting in the right people and voting out the wrong ones.

This is especially weird given that the Republican Party is increasingly flirting with the idea of violent retaliation against peaceful protesters - and that our history is replete with examples of that happening when they did it in places with hostile politicians, e.g. the civil rights movement in Southern states. Yeah, that imagery ultimately helped them, but it's not the 1960s anymore, we don't have three TV channels everyone watches, you can't guarantee that the people who most need to see it will, or without it being filtered through a bunch of bullshit demonizing the protesters. And a lot of people died or were otherwise hurt in the process, and their lives should matter to you. And a lot of how we ultimately defeated that was because the federal law forced Southern states to comply with all that. Because the people in the federal government making these decisions (like LBJ) were open to the cause of civil rights - which was one of the reasons that civil rights activists made voter registration so key to their efforts in 1964! It wasn't a thing that the activists in those states were able to force on racist, hostile politicians in places like Alabama without help from other people they voted for in the federal government.

There are lots of dedicated activists in Texas who want to help women there get abortions in every way they can; they still could only do so much once it was totally banned there, once Roe fell, and now their work is largely focused on helping Texas women travel out of state. The nationally-celebrated abortion clinic where I lived in Austin had to close and move to New Mexico after the Dobbs decision. Who is in power matters. The laws they pass matter. The way you do something about that? You fucking vote.

Likewise, a lot of this website and the broader left-wing Internet seems to acknowledge that trans rights are way worse in red states like Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, etc. than in blue states like on the West Coast or in New England/the Mid-Atlantic, or even in purple states with Dems in power (e.g. Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Pennsylvania). Same with reproductive rights. Okay, why do you think that is? Do you think the activists in Michigan or Massachusetts just care more than the ones in Montana? Or do you think it perhaps has something to do with who's passing laws? And why do you think this pattern holds so consistently in terms of whether that state is run by Democrats or Republicans??? In Michigan and Arizona in particular, they got where they are specifically because voters rejected extreme Republican policies en masse.

Voting comes before everything else. It is not just "one of many options." That's like saying that, say, showering is optional as long as you moisturize or something. Or brushing your teeth is optional. No, those are foundational things for cleanliness; the other stuff is on top of that. You need voting to make your activism work.

Today in 🍂✨October surprises✨🍂

• Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Secretary of Labor Julie Su quietly assisted in winning labor rights for dockworkers, ending a strike that could have had catastrophic economic consequences. (10-4-24)

• In Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian migrants have been blamed for the disappearance of local animals with Trump claiming “‘migrants are walking off’ with geese in the town” and “they’re eating the dogs” - a lie also promoted by JD Vance, Ohio’s own sitting Senator, with no evidence - it turns out that the missing geese were actually the victims of a 64-year-old white man who was hunting illegally. (10-3-24)

• A Trump-appointed federal judge blocked Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan again after another judge reinstated it earlier this week. (10-3-24)

• Republicans and crazy Facebook uncles everywhere have spent this week spreading disinformation about the FEMA response to Hurricane Helene, including AI photos of Trump standing in floodwater and wild claims that Biden is sending money to undocumented immigrants. In reality, the Biden-Harris administration has provided substantial emergency assistance and both Biden and Harris have visited the region. Meanwhile, it turns out that Trump was the one who redirected money from disaster relief to send to ICE during his presidency. Shocker. (10-4-24)

• Seriously, though, Trump is not who you want to call in an emergency. Before allowing disaster relief to reach victims of wildfires in California, then-president Trump forced aides to show him an electoral map to see if he had voters there. He evidently intended to withhold the aid if he found out it was going to mostly Democratic voters. This would be a career-ending scandal in any other political era but alas, we are living in this one. (10-3-24)

• Finally, far-right extremist and Oklahoma superintendent of schools Ryan Walters intends to put Bibles in public schools, which is already disturbing, but in a stunning display of corruption, the only ones that meet his specifications are the so-called “Trump Bibles” that include the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They go for $60 apiece and Trump gets fees from each one. (10-4-24)

No, wait, I’m going to say that one again:

In Oklahoma, taxpayers’ money will be used to put Trump Bibles in public schools. Their money will go directly to Trump. Not a joke!!! Not an exaggeration!!!

…Surely the voters who are still undecided are lying, right?? Right?!

30 days until Election Day.

Go to vote.org for a sample ballot, early voting dates, and more. Seriously, we have to win.

I see posts going "Okay, I'll vote for Kamala, I GUESS IF I HAVE TO" and "omg if that's the best we can do I suppose I'll support it" and I'm like...

What do you people fucking WANT?

Let's run down how she's rated politically by some organizations that we vibe with, kay?

In addition, GovTrack (which is a nonpartisan tracker) places her in the MOST politically left-leaning categories of Senators. So we've got a very liberal, woman of color who's spent her career trying to mitigate draconian tough-on-crime laws to benefit the accused and keep black people out of prison and decrease recidivism and that's somehow...just barely tolerable.

So I ask again...what is that you're dissatisfied with? Is it Palestine? as recently as March she was calling for a ceasefire and demanding aid to Gaza. Keep in mind she's pretty constrained as to what's possible to do in this situation.

Is it just that she was a prosecutor? That is an important job that needs to be done and we WANT people doing it who aren't rah-rah tough-on-crime Gestapo types, which she is not. We need prosecutors who are addressing the root causes of crime and looking for ways to help people escape the cycle, which she has done to the point that she was often called SOFT on crime.

So what is your objection here? Is it that her politics aren't 100% aligned with a bunch of Tumblr socialists? I got news for you...we Tumblr socialists DO NOT REPRESENT THE ELECTORATE. If such a candidate existed, they would not win.

Democrats struggle sometimes because our tent is large. Republicans just want you if you're a straight white man and preferably rich. There's room for a lot more types in the lefty side, but sadly that means a lot of room also for dissention among the ranks. This is how they get us. Let's not let them, huh? Just a suggestion.

Like, getting political for a moment. A thing a lot of people need to understand is that, ultimately, rules only exist if they are enforceable. The mechanism of enforcement is what determines the realness of a rule.

If you're playing Monopoly and you decide that being in Jail sucks so you move your piece to Go and call it a tunneling loophole, there's nothing built into the game to actually stop you from doing that. Other players yelling at you and banishing you from the table is how the rule is enforced. But if they don't, if they let you do that, then I'm sorry but that's just how the game is played now. If you're allowed to do it then it's not against the rules.

We all instinctively understand that when you're running track, you're not supposed to cross the lines into someone else's lane. But the lines are not a wall. They're not physically preventing you from doing anything. If you decide you want to run into the lane to your right and jump-kick the other racer, you physically can do that.

The line on the ground is a social construct. It's part of the magic circle; A thing that takes on special meaning, even psychological power, so long as we exist within its play space. But it's not real, and it only has power if somebody comes over and drags you off the field for striking that other racer.

At the highest echelons of power, a lot of what "can" and "can't" be done are actually just the boundaries of a magic circle with few real enforcement mechanisms. The President can't do that. But. Like. Who's going to stop him if he does?

The biggest thing we learned during the Trump Presidency was just how many restrictions on government power are illusory. Trump spent his four years in office testing the limits of what he can and can't do. Stepping over the lines of the magic circle to see which ones had enforcement mechanisms and which were merely decorative. And revealing that an alarming number were decorative.

Because the thing about the highest offices, about POTUS and SCOTUS and Congress, is that they're the highest offices. There's nobody above them. The only check on their power is each other and, contrary to what high school social studies might tell you, those checks aren't very strong at all.

Trump wants to redefine the game rules to be dictatorial. The magic circle says he can't do that. But the only factor that truly decides whether he can or can't is whether the other players at the table will let him do it. And if you listen to the way Republican Congressmen talk, it's not reassuring.

There are no executive super-cops who will arrest Trump if he breaks the rules. The Avengers are not going to show up and stop him from continuing to reconfigure the magic circle to his liking. The only thing, the only true restriction on his power, is the vote. It's the fact that we, as a population, get to make a choice as to whether or not he even gets to sit back down at the table to play again at all.

In a democracy, voters are the enforcement mechanism. Let's try and remember that when November comes around.

FYI: In the US, if you've been kicked from registration even though you're eligible to vote, you can report it to the DOJ:

In fact, if anyone tries to bar or intimidate you from voting, you can report it, because that shit's a federal offence. 🗳️

I'm going to go full boomer here for a minute: if you're interested in (US) politics, you should really be watching regular non-social media news.

Supernatural memes are great fun. And lots of people on social media are highlighting under-covered stories, giving voices to people who don't often get invited to MSNBC or CNN, and pointing out how to take action. But outrage is a great motivator and it takes work to put a post together. Assuming they're not outright bad actors, a lot of people putting current events social media posts together are outraged by something (which may well be outrageous), and want you to be outraged too.

Nothing's wrong with that in itself! The problem comes in when it's the only way you get news. Professional journalists are getting paid to collect, present, and analyze the news, so they're driven by something other than "this outrages me." Not always better, but different. And because they're dealing with current events consistently, you get deeper trends, more proportionality, more recognition that the very fact that X is outrageous but not unexpected given Y points to a larger problem Z lurking under the surface, that kind of thing.

Plus you get out of the echo chamber. That in itself can be helpful.

I personally like MSNBC's panel discussions. They're definitely liberal and often I wish they'd go further toward the truly progressive or even Marxist side of things; but they are close enough to my beliefs I can usually hear what they're trying to say. And if you don't have cable TV (I don't), they've got quite a lot of content on their YouTube page. It's a good complement to the more Tumblr-style news if nothing else.

@sarahthecoat: #beware clickbait#in online sources#both on social media#and “official” sites

Absolutely & always. Though I was thinking more about things trying to ramp up emotions particularly negative ones, than going after clicks for cash. Maybe we need a word for that? Rage-bait or Doom-bait? Seems like a new concept, but definitely not a new experience.

For me at least it helps to mix it up. If I listen to the talking heads and nothing else, I get too cerebral, but a little of that mixed with other ways of staying engaged makes me feel more educated and emotionally balanced at the same time. It helps me at least.

yeah, what i have been hearing is that especially the big commercial online souces tend to be more clickbaity because that's where their ad revenue comes from. i have such limited capacity for a lot of this stuff that it is not something i am going to delve into personally in any great detail. i can take in more at the local level, than national or international.

While I agree that you need to have different sources for political information and that should include traditional media outlets and that is true not only for this US election cycle, I do have some problems with the current US election media coverage. I have the feeling many media outlets are not able to grasp the risk that Donald Trump and the GOP poses to democracy. They still treat this election like any other and by doing so, don't really cover the extremism of the current GOP well. And they also don't cover the mental decline of Trump well, especially in comparison to how they covered the age problems of Biden. I see both problems especially in the New York Times, but also with CNN, but many others like the Washington Post or the main TV news programs are not much better.

My advice for more traditional media that is better at grasping the threat to democracy is The Atlantic.

And for a traditional journalist who is now independent I would advise to subscribe to the newsletter of Aaron Rupar - https://www.publicnotice.co

Both media outlets have the disadvantage that you can only read parts or a limited amount of articles for free, but Aaron Rupar is also on Twitter, Threads and Blue Sky and he shares lots of clips of political rally and tv appearances of the candidates. And the daily politics newsletter of The Atlantic delivers one short article per day for free.

Also, I can recommend subscribing to the newsletter of political scientist Brian Klaas - https://www.forkingpaths.co. He is a researcher who has a deep knowledge about corruption and dictatorships, but while his newsletter sometimes deals with current political stuff he also writes about lots of other interesting stuff.

Rent control is on the ballot for California voters this November.

I uh, get that tumblr isn't exactly sorted by geography, but this is a huge deal.

It's a huge deal even for people who don't expect to be personally affected by it -- rent control is a protection against the poorest people living in a city being forced out, and that's just bad for everyone. When you have a city where only medium well off to rich people live, you get their service employees coming in from a suburb an hour and a half away (blech) or else you get people stacked three to a room. Or people holding down a job or three while trying to earn enough to get off the street or, well, out of their parents' place or away from the abusive partner they can't afford to break up with. Point is, a lack of housing that people can just keep living in at the same price, means a lot of bad things for society, and we probably aren't going to socialize housing within the next ten years but maybe we can get rent control back.

right. be sure to register at the actual government site, or in person at town or city hall, not at one of those shady voter suppression sites masquerading as a "convenient" site.

>Join a union

>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it's all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what's going on

>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members

>The only attendees are the same ten guys every month, giving detailed reports about everything that's going on

Yeah, there's a surprising amount of people who just...don't interact with the union they are in at all. At all. And then complain when shit gets voted in they didn't want.

Maybe get involved. Show up to shit. Just a thought.

This is also true of the Democratic Party btw. People are always complaining about what "The Democrats" should do, or aren't doing etc etc.

but like literally in my early 20s I started going to my local party's meetings regularly and with-in a few months they were like "hey you want to be on the committee to re-write our by-laws?" yes, yes I do thank you. "hey you want to get elected to be one of our representatives to the meetings of the state party?" why yes thank you so I got to go and debate the budget of a swing state Democratic Party.

I had to move for work not that much after that but like people I know from that have been delegates to the DNC, have elected officials come to their homes for events. Literally there's a middle aged lady I know who when Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, Hillary started with a small tour on a van, she called it her Scooby Van, and her first stop in New Hampshire, with its "first in the nation" primary was to a bakery in my home town and the person she sat with at what was her first or second official campaign stop of her run for President is a lady I know who isn't some super secret Democratic overlord or anything but a local lady who volunteers a lot.

Just the other day I got invited to meet my Senator (again) tomorrow I'm going to meet my state's governor (again) because I volunteer, if I wanted I could likely get to be a delegate to the DNC

so many organizations are open doors that people just refuse to push and then are big mad it didn't read their minds and do what you think.

So, a comparatively high amount of states are voting on the fate of ranked choice voting this year. Missouri is voting on whether or not to kill it, Alaska is voting on whether or not to keep it, and most importantly, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho are voting on whether or not to adopt ranked choice voting, with maybe Colorado to follow.

And if you live in these states, even if you don't want to vote at the top of the ticket, I urge you to get out there and vote in favor of ranked choice voting on all of them.

Like, the two-party monopoly is a big part of the reason why politics in this country is so shit, and a big part of that is our "first past the post" system making it basically mathematically impossible for candidates outside of them to win anything beyond a local or state level.

So, if you want to try and break the cycle of voting for the lesser evil, of bipartisan cruelty towards the Global South and the country's own citizens alike, we need to change this and we need to vote on it where we can.

I'd like to add what "ranked choice voting" means here, in case anyone reading this doesn't already know.

It means that instead of choosing one candidate to vote for when you fill out your ballot, you rank them in order of preference.

For a simplified example, say that Joe, John, and Dana are the candidates for a particular office. Maybe Joe really sucks, Dana is kinda ok but not great, but John is the candidate you think is the best.

With the current system, if Dana and Joe are the major-party candidates, it's hard to justify voting for John because you know he's not gonna win, right? So you end up voting for Dana because the alternative is Joe wins and he really, really sucks! But you're also cranky because you would have preferred to vote for John.

With ranked choice voting, you can vote for John AND vote against Joe at the same time. You simply fill out your ballot like:

and then turn it in.

When the votes are counted, first they look at all the first-choice votes, so your vote is counted for John.

If one candidate has more than 50% of the total votes, they're declared the winner. If not, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and the people who picked them first have their second-choice votes counted. In this example with only three candidates that can only go one round before someone has to have over 50%, but it could iterate as many times as necessary for however many candidates there are.

So if, say, John only got 30% of the first-choice votes while Dana got 32% and Joe got 38%, Joe is not the winner by default because he got the biggest share of the one round of votes. He's in the lead, but your second-choice, along with everyone else's who picked John as their first choice, will be counted next. So your vote goes to Dana now, because you prefer her over Joe and your favorite guy got eliminated.

If enough people who liked John the best liked Dana the second best, she can still win the election. And then, because the stats on how the first choices went will be publicly visible, she can see that it might be a good idea for her to shift some of her stances to align more with John's -- and those stats will more accurately reflect people's true preferences, because no one felt like they had to vote for her under duress because otherwise Joe might win and he's the actual worst, instead of the stats on who prefers John over Dana being skewed by practicality decisions the way they would be with our current system.

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #32

August 30-September 6 2024.

Not to be a debbie downer but Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years, including during the Iraq war. He called the national guard on protestors following the George Floyd murder. He supports Israel. He's approved an oil pipeline across indigenous lands that break treaties.

It's weird to celebrate a man who goes against all leftist values

Elbit System, a top international arms manufacturer, who's weapons have been found in Israel, is also located in Tim Walz's state. People have protested for him to divest. Nothing.

Sigh, alright, guess I'm actually going to defend a politician for once, let's do this I guess:

--

"Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years, including during the Iraq war" - Half True.

Tim Walz was in the military for 24 years. As a member of the national guard. He was never deployed overseas.

The man left the military in May of 2005 in order to run for public office. The unit of the NG he served with, the 125th Field Artillery, weren't mobilised for a deployment order until July of the same year, and people he worked with have come forward to confirm that one of the reasons he left was because he was morally opposed to the war.

Tim Walz never went to Iraq, the man didn't step onto foreign soil as a military man apart from a brief deployment to Italy in 2003 as part of the security forces during Operation Enduring Freedom. The man himself openly says that he never saw direct combat, ever.

--

"He called the national guard on protestors following the George Floyd murder" - This is such a gross oversimplification of the role a state governor plays during times of unrest that it's just fully a misrepresentation.

(It's also a misrepresentation of what the National Guard even is, but that's a whole other can of worms.)

Tim Walz didn't make the singular decision to mobilise the national guard. He did not singlehandedly call the national guard. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, contacted Walz' office on the evening of the 27th of May to formally request the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard to the city.

This request by the mayor was immediately followed up with a written request by the Minneapolis Police Chief, Medaria Arradondo, who sent it through a couple of hours later.

Once that happened, there was no way for Tim Walz to ignore those requests. He was the governor of a state.

Tim Walz did not dispatch the National Guard to the city until the next evening. His hesitation and delay to call in the Guard even once he was formally requested to do so by the mayor of a city is one of the things he was slammed for, and was a black stain on his tenure as governor.

I'm not defending the actions of the National Guard once they were deployed, not by any means, but I am defending the idea that Tim Walz went all in on savage crackdowns when he verifiably did the opposite. In fact, during the strategising phase of the mobilisation, the governor's office filed numerous requests with the city for a list of defensive priorities, so that the guard would be protecting federal property.

But the actions of the National Guard once they were there, were not in Tim Walz' hands. The governor of a state is not a Commander In Chief like the president is.

(What was up to Tim Walz was his decision to make sure the state's Attorney General led the prosecution during the case against the police officers involved in the George Floyd trial, which resulted in the convictions. This move by Tim Walz was praised by civil rights groups.

I'll also point out that his decisions, reforms, and rulings in regards to police brutality were praised by Reverand Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, who said; "We don't want a guy who's wildly radical -- we want someone with an open mind, he has shown that with how he addressed police brutality in his own state,"

And also by Jotaka Eaddy, the founder of Win With Black Women, who said "Governor Walz’s tenure has also been marked by his steadfast commitment to advancing social justice and protecting vulnerable communities and communities of color.")

--

"He Supports Israel" - True, completely true. ,But I hate to break this to you; every single institutional "In Crowd" Democrat supports Israel. The Venn Diagram of "Democrats who don't support Israel" and "Democrats who will end up near the White House" has no overlap. I'm sorry.

--

"He's approved an oil pipeline across indigenous lands that break treaties." - Also entirely true, and indefensible. Fuck him for that one. Absolutely.

--

And finally, "Elbit System, a top international arms manufacturer, who's weapons have been found in Israel, is also located in Tim Walz's state. People have protested for him to divest. Nothing." -

Elbit System isn't located in Minnesota, it's located in Texas, but why let a bit of googling and research get in the way of some good outrage.

They don't list any facilities or operation centers being in Minnesota. I have spent half an hour trying my best to find any evidence of any connection Minnesota has with Elbit System at all, but apart from one single f*cking petition that claims that the Minnesota retirement funds own 10,000 shares of Elbit Systems, but lists no sources for its outrage I can't find anything.

Elbit Systems have operational facilities in Texas, New Hampshire, Alabama, Virginia, and Florida. Their administration offices are in Alabama, Utah, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and Maryland.

Those are all also currently Republican states, with the only exception being Maryland.

They are a publicly owned company, this is all information you can find with a bit of simple googling.

But again, hey, why let a bit of basic fact checking get in the way of some good outrage.

--

So yeah, there's all that. Jesus Christ, you're all fucking unbearable.

Regarding indigenous issues, I also want to point out Walz's lieutenant governor is White Earth Nation Ojibwe. If Walz gets elected, she would be the first Native American governor of a US state. I can't speak to the oil pipeline stuff, it sounds like that sucks. But it's not like Walz isn't committed to the welfare of indigenous people in the state.

I know this is a little out of left field, but here is Walz's speech at a GIS user conference where he talks about how geographic literacy is important and how the state of Minnesota uses GIS to support environmental and social initiatives.

Minnesota's goal is have the lowest rate of child poverty in the nation. They do this with a tax credit. But you can't get a tax credit if you don't file taxes. So they used GIS to pinpoint to the street level where they needed to target filing initiatives, going door to door in some places.

I'm telling you this because it is a lot of work trying to attack big problems from multiple angles, and it's not always going to be as clean and morally pure as people hope. But it is evident Walz is setting the tone for a state that is trying hard to do right by its residents.

There is no such thing as a morally pure politician that can get things done. It is the nature of politics that sometimes you have to compromise. But that's where the bus metaphor comes in. You use politicians to get you closer to where you want to be, instead of not getting on the bus because it's not going on the path you want it to take.

I would also add to the excellent fact-checking here: we should always be asking questions when we see posts and statements like this.

In this case, the answer to all three questions is no. And I would actually say that it doesn’t pass the disinformation sniff test: https://instituteforpr.org/10-ways-to-spot-disinformation/

It’s wild the number of posts I come across where people act like voting for or supporting Harris and Walz in the election is tantamount to implicitly supporting genocide. You know what actually helps genocide? Doing nothing while pretending you have the moral high ground. America is deeply tied to Israel and there will be no candidate who is as critical of their actions as we want them to be. We as private citizens do not have the power to make the USA suddenly cease all activity with Israel and demand an uncompromising ceasefire deal. Instead, we have to get our hands dirty and decide what path forward will mitigate as much harm as possible. You have one presidential candidate saying Israel needs to finish the job and another saying that we can’t ignore the tragedies in Gaza while vocally supporting a temporary ceasefire. These are your two picks. Thinking any third party candidate has a shot when none have any wide-reaching name recognition less than 100 days before the election is a fever dream.

The question then becomes, are you willing to say you voted “correctly” by voting for someone who has no shot of winning but is most closely aligned to you? Or are you going to vote for who will do the least harm? The idea that voting for a president involves liking them is a fairy tale. The establishment will always be the enemy of civil rights and safety. You’re voting for which opponent you want in office. The writing is on the wall about which candidate will be less of an uphill battle to fight against, and sidestepping the responsibility of making that decision by throwing away a vote isn’t moral or intellectually groundbreaking - it’s cowardly.