Rep. Elijah Cummings

I read with sadness this morning that my representative in Congress, Elijah Cummings, died this morning in hospice care. He was a strong voice in the House and held truth to power wherever and whenever he was present. As a strong opponent of our current administration, I was proud to see him stand up for his (and our) principles. He will be missed. Tyler Tynes wrote a great article about him over at The Ringer. 

Date posted: October 17, 2019 | Filed under politics | Leave a Comment »

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Interesting…

We walked across the street to the elementary school and cast our votes yesterday with Finn. This has been a family tradition since she was born (we brought her over in a carrier when she was only several weeks old) and she stood with Jen as she filled out her ballot. This morning we have a new Democratic Governor and Attorney General, and it’ll be legal to smoke (and grow!) weed in Maryland by June 2023. Let’s hope the rest of the country brings good news too.

Trump takes the Fifth during his deposition. I am shocked.

While campaigning in 2016, Trump suggested not answering questions was a sign of guilt. At a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016, Trump said, “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

An independent bike manufacturer in California started selling bikes for 45% off to Black riders, called Black Reparations Pricing. Within 18 months, hatred and legal action from the Right shut it down.

“Whenever people of color get any sort of benefit, others respond immediately that they should be getting the exact same kind of benefit,” Vernon says.“People will come out of the woodwork to try to claim a kind of grievance when they don’t seem to have any stake in the issue…”

This was on my mind before the bad news on Friday, but Jen and I have seen it pop up a lot over the weekend: now that abortion is criminalized, how long will it take for data brokers to sell out women based on their period-tracking software? I put an app on Finn’s iPad for this very reason, though I’m better at entering the information than she is. The Heath app on her iPhone is much more secure than this; by design all of the information stays local on the phone itself.

By the way: Not long.

In 1994, after a series of mass shootings, Congress banned many assault weapons. A decade later, the ban expired, and these firearms flooded the market. According to the Wall Street Journal, before 1994 there were an estimated four hundred thousand AR-15s in the U.S.; today, there are twenty million AR-15s or similar weapons.

The New Yorker does a deep dive into the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and how a troubled, bullied kid made a colossal series of mistakes and was co-opted by a whole slew of opportunists eager to exploit his situation. Nobody comes out OK in this story.

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