Camden Paillot is on fire in McSweeney's: "Indeed, one may 'like' Sanders’ populist, pro-working-class ideology that has enticed  —  let me be clear  —  millions of struggling Americans, but being dragged too far left means losing the vote of cartoonish top-hat-wearing-villains, phrenology-practicing conservative centrists, and Democrat-leaning billionaires residing on secret sex-predator-islands, whose only apparent mission is to make the biosphere collapse faster." (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (I am a donor to both Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's campaigns) Read the rest

Viktor Orban and his far-right, xenophobic, conspiratorial Fidesz party have led Hungary through a string of catastrophes, from its handling of Middle Eastern migrants to its ouster of the internationally famous Central European University to the passage of a slave labor bill that allowed employers to require hundreds of hours of mandatory overtime that needn't be paid for for years to the creation of a parallel system of partisan "administrative courts" to investigate government corruption and electoral fraud. Read the rest

Canada's Conservative Party is terrible, and it has terrible policies, and it will be terrible for Canada if they are elected. I already voted against them with my mail-in ballot. That said, the CBC is 100% wrong to sue the Tories for copyright infringement over the inclusion of short debate clips in Conservative campaign websites and tweets. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders remains one of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential elections, but you'd hardly know it from the media narrative, which consistently downplays, ignores or misstates Sanders' campaign platform and his achievements in favor of establishment candidates and even other trustbusters like Elizabeth Warren. Read the rest

As former MEP Marietje Schaake (previously) writes, "Can we please stop calling Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc ‘The online public square’? They’re ad companies. It is like calling a billboard ad a ’vertical public message’.... Pay for play, social media & search engines have created an online marketplace of ideas. Money talks." (via JWZ) Read the rest

This morning, we were out on our lawn, putting up our Halloween decorations, when this fellow jogged past and said something to me. I had my headphones in and so I just waved and smiled, but then he doubled back and so I took my headphones out and said, "Hi," whereupon he began to swear and shout: "How fucking dare you have a Warren sign on your lawn?" Read the rest

Elizabeth Warren has already proposed strict limits on lobbyists' activities, but in her latest policy proposal, she offers a way of hitting the most aggressive lobbyists in their pocketbooks, and using the revenue to strengthen Congress and the administrative agencies' independence from corporate influence while empowering members of the public to be heard by their government and its agencies. Read the rest

In July, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg held two hour-long internal employee meetings to discuss the business's future; The Verge obtained the recordings of those meetings, which reveal, among other things, that Zuckerberg dreads the possible election of Elizabeth Warren (Warren has pledged to break up Facebook and its Big Tech competitors if she becomes President in 2020). Read the rest

For three years now, cryptographer Matt Blaze (previously) and his colleagues have hosted a Voting Village at Defcon, the annual hacker con in Vegas, in which all comers are welcomed to try to compromise a variety of voting machines that are in actual use in American elections. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders has pledged to eliminate the $81b in outstanding US medical debt if he is elected president in 2020. Read the rest

If Vladimir Putin didn't convince you that good pecs and hair do not qualify you to govern, I give you Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime ministerial princeling whose years in office have proven that there is no policy so progressive that he will not back it -- provided he never has to do anything to make it happen. Read the rest

The U.S. government will launch a program about a month from now to help state officials prevent ransomware attacks on voter registration databases and systems, ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Read the rest

Writing on Crooked Timber, John Quiggin (previously) responds to the epidemic of elderly reactionaries piling vitriol and violent rhetoric on the child activist Greta Thunberg and asks, why not let kids vote? Read the rest

Even by Elizabeth Warren's high standards, her plan for "honoring and empowering tribal nations and indigenous peoples is detailed, ambitious, and important. Read the rest

Few states have voting machines that are simultaneously more obviously defective and more ardently defended by the state government than Georgia, where 16-year-old touchscreen systems are prone to reporting ballots cast by 243% of the eligible voters and where gross irregularities in election administration sends voters to the wrong polling places or sends co-habitating husbands and wives to polls in different cities to cast their votes. Read the rest

In 1978, anti-taxation extremists managed to get a California ballot measure, Proposition 13, passed, and with it, they managed to effectively end the ability of cities to provide services to their residents, by capping property tax at 1% of their cash values, and limiting property tax increases to the lower of the annual inflation or 2%. Read the rest

She's called Cardi B because her family nickname, Bacardi, couldn't get past the trademark defensebots on Instagram! Read the rest