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Jon Queally at Common Dreams writes—'If You Want to End Unrest, End the Conditions That Create It,' Declares Ocasio-Cortez Amid Nationwide Protest:
In a video message posted to Instagram on Saturday amidst days of nationwide protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a plea to anyone calling for the end of the "unrest" stirred by brutality and oppression to focus on the root causes of poverty, distrust, and violence in American society.
"If you are calling for an end to this unrest ... but you are not calling for the end to the conditions that created the unrest, you are a hypocrite," Ocasio-Cortez said in the post.
"If you're trying to call for the end to unrest, but you don't believe healthcare is a human right. If you're afraid to say Black Lives Matter. If you're too scared to call out police brutality—then you aren't asking for an to unrest. You are asking for injustice to continue and for your people to continue to endure the violence of poverty, the violence of lack of housing access, the violence of police brutality and not say a damn thing. That's what you're asking for."
"So if you're out here," she continued, "asking for an end to unrest, you better be asking for healthcare as a human right, you better be calling for accountability in our policing, you better be supporting community review boards, you better be supporting the end of housing discrimination, you better be standing up to for-profit real estate developers that are intimidating people and trying to evict them from their homes—that's what you better be calling for. Because if you don't call for those things and you're asking for the end of unrest—all you're asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression." [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Palm Beach supervisor of elections won’t participate in Florida voter purge with bad lists:
Writing at Rolling Stone, Ari Berman says that the Florida Republicans' voting purge is taking voter suppression to a "brazen new extreme." How brazen and extreme is it? Enough to make one county elections supervisor refuse to participate in it.
Think Progress interviewed Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher, who has refused to purge the 115 voters the state identified in her county as being non-citizens and ineligible to vote. [...]
Bad lists be damned, the state not only isn't reconsidering the purge, it's going to intensify it. Which could mean tens of thousands of eligible voters purged from the rolls. So far, about 2,700 of the 180,000 plus voters the state has identified as being non-citizens have been challenged, and a very high percentage have been incorrectly identifed. Berman extrapolates from that data:
The first batch of names was riddled with inaccuracies. For example, as the progressive blog Think Progress noted, "an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as 'non-citizens' in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher." If this ratio holds for the rest of the names on the non-citizens list, more than 35,000 eligible voters could be disenfranchised. [...]