Anyone who is legally eligible to cast a ballot in an election should be allowed to do so in whatever way is most convenient for them. If that's in-person on election day, great; by mail, great; in-person in the weeks leading up to an election, great.

That is the only acceptable way for a democratic republic to function. Voting should be easy and it should be encouraged. There should be:

- Automatic voter registration.
- No excuses needed to vote absentee.

This is not controversial.
It's telling how people defend more restrictive voting methods. Look at this ridiculous quote from Pete Hegseth about how everyone being able to easily cast a ballot somehow stripping people of the "recourse" of the ballot box.
https://t.co/4AcTPT2HfD
They know there's not widespread fraud. It's not about "fraud." It never was.

They just want to put as many obstacles in the way as humanly possible, to make it more difficult for people to vote.
"We could've voted in person. I can go to Walmart. I can go to a store, I can go to a restaurant, I can go to sports games in some places. You tell me we couldn't have voted? I just don't buy it."

No one stopped you from voting in person, Pete!
If you're a minimum wage worker who doesn't get paid time off, who lives in an area where the number of polling places is limited and always has hours of lines... you're going to be less likely to vote *on* election day.
Only Republicans could look at record turnout and treat it like a problem that needs to be solved.
Efforts to limit early voting, to make it harder to cast votes by mail, to make it easier to reject ballots on technicalities like whether or not it was sent inside a special envelope... those are efforts to disenfranchise people.
Because all of those things are designed to affect the ability of people who work hourly jobs with little flexibility and an inability to take hours off in the middle of the day and live in densely-populated areas to cast votes. It's no coincidence that those are people who
tend to vote for Democrats. It's an attack on people of color. It's an attack on democracy. It's unacceptable.

And it's time the press started treating it as such.
Look at how often mainstream media outlets adopt the conservative framing on these election restrictions: "election security measures," "anti-voter fraud initiatives," etc.

Shameful. It's not a matter of "this side says it's about security, this other side says suppression"
"Both sides" coverage is how we got to this place. A fascist mob tried to overturn the election results. Mainstream media played a role in it.
How often are the people trying to add various "election integrity" measures asked what the ratio of instances of fraud their bills will prevent to the number of disenfranchised voters is? Never?
A lot of the DC media acting shocked and appalled with what happened yesterday are the same outlets that have led us to this point.

And had they, personally, not felt threatened, could they have even mustered up what outrage they did have?
Yesterday needs to be a major wake-up call. This is what endless "in this Trump town, they never stopped saying 'Merry Christmas'" profiles and "Meet the dapper Nazi" pieces have created.
Do better. And that means more than just a single day of acting outraged. That means reevaluating what the role of the press is in a functioning society, and rethinking journalism. It can't be entertainment anymore. It just can't.
The people who make decisions at CNN, NYT, WaPo, CBS, ABC, the AP, NPR, Reuters, USA Today, NBC, etc., won't see this thread. Or if they do, it won't sink in.

I can hope, though.
(I use "in this Trump town, they never stopped saying merry christmas" as an example because, I kid you not, it's something the Washington Post actually published... as if the rest of the country had stopped recognizing Christmas https://t.co/DaO6vPXR5A )

More from Parker Molloy

There are a number of reasons bills like these are wrongheaded. One is that it tries to implement the same kind of one-size-fits-all solution that opponents of trans inclusion claim to oppose.

But let’s get nuanced for a minute...


Do trans women and girls have an advantage in sports over other women and girls?

I’m here to provide a very unsatisfying answer: It depends.

What sport are we talking about?

How old are people competing in it?

What sort of hormone treatment has the person in question had and for how long?

Those are all factors that play into the fairness question.

Trying to implement broad policies in the name of ensuring fairness can actually have the opposite of the intended effect.

Take the case of Mack Beggs.

A few years back, Beggs was a high school student in Texas. He was a wrestler, and wanted to do it at the college level.

Beggs is a trans man, meaning his birth certificate said female on it. Like many trans guys, he takes testosterone as part of his medical transition.

He wanted to wrestle. Specifically, he wanted a spot on his school’s boys team.

He wasn’t allowed.
This is a good piece by @AaronBlake. I've been scratching my head over claims that there was something in this trove of emails that implicated Fauci in something bad because pretty much everything matched up with what was being said publicly at whatever time the emails were from.


One thing that's occurred to me over the past few years is that there's a sense that the mere *existence* of emails is seen as evidence of wrongdoing, which is obviously nonsense.

It played out that way when it came to the DNC and Podesta emails in 2016, the Hunter Biden e-mails in 2020, these e-mails in 2021. It wasn't that there was much that was damning in, say, the DNC emails that helped sink Clinton's candidacy, but just their existence ...

... gave off a sense of corruption/scandal/etc., that weighed more heavily on people's perception of them as the result of them taking the form of a leak/data dump.

And it's kind of similar with the Fauci e-mails (which weren't leaked, but were FOIAed).

Anyway, again, @AaronBlake's post is a good and methodical breakdown of some of the bizarre claims being thrown about. If there's anything we didn't already know contained in those e-mails, I haven't seen it.
When Biden talked about unity, he was very specific about what he meant, and the insistence of right-wing tools like @Kredo0 to try to frame stuff like this as “betraying his own ‘unity agenda’” (what is that even a quote from?) shows how pointless it is to try to work with Rs.


Guys like @Kredo0 want to a.) put the onus of unifying the country entirely on Biden and Dems, b.) pretend that “unity” is the same as capitulation, while c.) not giving an inch on their end.

No. No, no, no. Nice try.

Really, get all the way the fuck out of here with that take. “Biden didn’t keep Trump’s POLITICAL APPOINTEES in their position, therefore Biden isn’t unifying the country.” Fuuuuuuck off with that bullshit.

When Biden said “unity,” he was talking about trying to help ALL Americans, not just the ones who voted for him. This, sadly, needed to be said after the Trump administration repeatedly tried to screw over people who didn’t support him.

Remember when the Trump administration INTENTIONALLY let the virus rage out of control (really should have been a bigger scandal, but 🤷🏻‍♀️) because it was mostly hitting states that voted for Dems?
This is what pisses me off about the constant bad faith victimhood crap people on the right do:

1. They wildly misrepresent something innocuous (no, Pelosi did not “ban” anything).

2. They come up with a “gotcha” example of hypocrisy... that relies on their misrepresentation.


This same exact nonsense gets trotted out constantly. “Oh, so now we’re not allowed to call ourselves husbands or mothers or uncles or aunts or men or women?! Outrage!” But no one at all is doing that, nor have they ever been doing that.

Yet the right loses its shit over this every few months. A lot of the time it’ll be something like... a lawmaker will introduce a bill that would tweak applications for marriage licenses to say “spouse 1” and “spouse 2” instead of just “husband/wife” because the status quo ...

... will have been creating actual legal issues for gay couples who then have to put something false on legal documents designating one of them as “wife.”

It’ll be something like that, just meant to fix an issue that has no material impact on 99% of people.

And the right, like clockwork, will lose their minds over it as though anyone is trying to “ban” the concept of someone being a husband or a wife or a man or a woman or whatever.

From a few years back, here’s Bill O’Reilly doing that

More from Legal

GP State Department diplomats work for Pompeo, not the other way around. They should shut their yaps or quit.

Also, it's telling how much the horrible, illegal attacks on the Capitol have made establishment DC and its permanent bureaucracy quake in their boots.


GP The bureaucrats have always assumed they were untouchable, unassailable, protected. They assumed things would never change and that people in the hinterlands could safely be ignored forever because they're backwards hick Jesus-loving gun clingers and too dumb to listen to.

GP Government's overall disregard for ordinary Americans from treating us like bottomless wallets to trying to force us to believe as they do to ignoring basic legal and constitutional restraints on their actions built resentment over time and DC was blind to it.

GP When the hicks from the sticks got Trump elected, DC fought back against Trump and by extension them with everything at its disposal. Media pushed made up crap to hamstring Trump. Biden and Obama secretly used government to torment and assail an incoming administration.

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.