The Sorensen Monologues

U.S. Democracy Recalled

More on the 158 campaign donors here. It may not come as a surprise that they skew heavily Republican. One of them apparently brings home $68.5 million a month. After taxes.

Voter Suppression Funnies

So, Alabama is shuttering drivers license offices in every county in which African-Americans comprise 75% or more of voters, and Kansas has an anti-immigrant zealot as its Secretary of State, who is purging some 36,000 names from a list of citizens who tried to register to vote but could not complete the process (sometimes unknowingly) because they didn’t have a birth certificate handy. This is all supposedly in the name of preventing “voter fraud” — an event so rare as to be statistically nonexistent — while perpetrating the outlandish fraud of disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters.

And much of America snoozes while all this is happening.

(PS: Just saw that the Governor of Alabama has responded to the outcry by offering to open those offices one day a month. This announcement came a day before Hillary Clinton’s visit to Alabama.)

Obama apologizes for bombing of Mayo Clinic

Apologies to the Mayo Clinic for this one. They were on my mind because my aunt recently had heart surgery there (I hear she received excellent care).

While the U.S. may not blow up civilians in foreign lands every single day, many civilians do fear air strikes by the U.S. and our allies every day. These massacres keep happening over and over and over again. Would Americans tolerate drone strikes and other aerial bombings in their neighborhoods because someone thinks a terrorist might be hiding in a nearby house? Can you imagine living this way for years on end?

This case is particularly bad since it seems to be a deliberate strike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital. Glenn Greenwald does a good job summing up the shifting arguments coming out of the military.

The Joys of “Campus Carry”

Earlier this year, Texas passed its own “campus carry” law despite opposition from University of Texas Chancellor William McRaven, former leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. (Yeah, he did that.) Texas now joins other states such as Idaho, Wyoming, and Oregon (!), which are forcing colleges to allow concealed handguns on campus to varying degrees. In the wake of school shootings like the one in Roseburg, OR, it’s tempting to think that a “good samaritan” with a gun could prevent loss of life, but there’s not exactly a precedent yet for armed civilians stopping a mass shooting. There have been, however, an incomprehensible number of deaths from gunfire. It seems likely that the number of accidents, suicides, and heat-of-the-moment shootings would quickly eclipse the number of lives saved by armed college students.

On a lighter note, one thing I miss about college is that glorious moment of finding pizza left over from an event, yours for the taking.