• Yes, the Green Party nominee Jill Stein is an anti-vaxer. Since Stein is an actual doctor, this is especially inexcusable. Note that Hillary Clinton is the only remaining presidential candidate who’s pro-vaccine.
• In very good news, a federal court strikes down North Carolina’s brazenly racist voter ID law. They didn’t even try to disguise what they were doing:
As the court explains, North Carolina passed its omnibus voting bill, SL 2013-381, almost immediately after the Supreme Court freed the state’s voting laws from federal “preclearance” โ meaning that after nearly 50 years under supervision, the state was finally free to change voting laws without federal oversight. The legislature promptly “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices.” And “upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected black voters.”
• Noam Chomsky on lesser-evil voting and the “politics of moral witness”. (See also: Top 5 Alternatives To Hillary Clinton For Progressives Post-Sanders, from Sincere Kirabo.)
• The Ryan Bundy trial promises to be hilarious.
• Former comedian Scott Adams continues his descent into misogynist self-parody, declaring that seeing all these women at the Democratic convention drains his precious testosterone.
In other greatest hits, Adams has also said that it doesn’t matter if Donald Trump is wildly unqualified, because the president can learn anything they need to know in an hour:
If experience is necessary for being president, name a political topic I can't master in one hour under the tutelage of top experts.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 28, 2016
It’s this kind of Dunning-Krugeresque overconfident ignorance that led to “heckuva job, Brownie” and all the other blunders of the Bush administration. As I’ve written before, even routine ambassadorial assignments take months of study and preparation. Adams seems to think that preparing to be the leader of the free world can be done like a college freshman pulling an overnighter for a test.
• And last but not least:
It begins. pic.twitter.com/WxSx4ZBK1v
— Adam Lee (@DaylightAtheism) July 30, 2016