Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviews Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union::
AMY GOODMAN: [...] The issue of mail-in voting, increasingly significant in this critical election year, how is it threatened? What does this mean?
MARK DIMONDSTEIN: Well, look, we’re talking now about basic access to the ballot box and defense of our cherished and hard-fought right to vote. And the reality is, the Post Office is the most trusted federal agency, 91% in the last Pew Research poll last week, obviously also reflecting a new and great appreciation for what postal workers are doing during this crisis. But we’ve been servicing the people of this country on vote by mail and the information around balloting, voter registration and so on, for decades and decades. And the states that have mandatory vote by mail have absolutely no fraud. So that’s just not true. And so, if people are going have true access to the ballot box, we’re going to have to have vote by mail. And that’s been really brought home in this tragic crisis. And if we don’t have a United States public Postal Service, we will not be able to have vote by mail. And anybody that thinks voting can take place on the internet and take place safely, that’s a pipe dream. The internet, in all aspects, can be easily hacked. Mail cannot be. So, it’s a great way. People are voting voluntarily that way, long before this crisis, in California —
AMY GOODMAN: And they don’t have to pay, of course, when they’re sending in their vote by mail —
MARK DIMONDSTEIN: No.
AMY GOODMAN: — because we have a U.S. Post Office, unlike the private corporations.
MARK DIMONDSTEIN: That’s right. That’s right. It actually saves the cities, states, counties money. It works well. It increases voter participation. And just the opposite of thousands of people getting together filling out each other’s ballots, it actually gives people a chance to make a more informed vote, to think about it, but to have access to the ballot box. The last time I went to vote, last November, was a three-hour wait at the polling place. And, of course, our elections are on a workday, so it’s much more hard — it’s much harder for working people to vote.
So, it’s a thrust towards more democracy, defense of our democratic rights. And obviously, this pandemic has brought home that if we’re going to have true access to the ballot box — or more access to the ballot box, because we really don’t have true access now — vote by mail is definitely the way to go. It was before. Now it’s very, very clear. And postal workers are ready to continue to serve the people of this country in all sorts of ways, including that defense of our democratic right to vote.
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“There is no such thing as the open shop, really. There is a union shop and a nonunion shop. Everybody that believes in the open shop disbelieves in the union shop, whatever they say.”
~~Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (1932)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—Yoo: President can order child's testicles crushed, not contractor transparency:
Apparently, the unitary executive power begins on the other side of our borders. From among John Yoo's greatest hits:
Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty...
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: COVID v. "the flu." Greg Dworkin explains where flu data comes from. It's important, but not as much as understanding that COVID's way worse. DC Circuit rehears McGahn case. Did Trump's order to keep meat packing plants open actually do anything?
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