Weekend link dump for July 29

The kids are all right, no matter what the haters say.

“For infertility advocates, the Arizona law is less a Solomonic decree than a portent of a borderline-dystopian future wherein the government can compel people to become parents long after they decide they don’t want to be.”

“For almost a decade the internet has quietly maintained an obscure Futurama joke”.

“The Russian hackers, in other words, are the modern equivalents of the Watergate burglars in 1972. The only difference is the technology.”

Meet Nicole Maines, who will be the first transgender superhero on next season’s Supergirl.

“Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh suggested several years ago that the unanimous high court ruling in 1974 that forced President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, leading to the end of his presidency, may have been wrongly decided.” I’m sure this has nothing at all to do with our current political situation.

“Victims of tragedies like the Sandy Hook shooting and their families, however, have been largely left out of the conversation. Ryan Graney, who leads a group of volunteers spearheading efforts to pull Sandy Hook conspiracy content, said there is no formal way for such families to reach a human being at Facebook.”

RIP, Don Sanders, longtime fixture on the Houston music scene. As I wrote on Facebook, my roommate and I moved into Sanders’ former house in Montrose after he and his wide sold it to their next-door neighbor after having a kid. He was a genuinely nice guy and very talented, and I’m happy to have known him and saddened by his death.

Here’s the story of an iconic television house that may not be long for this world.

Banishment is totally still a thing in some states. It’s probably unconstitutional at the federal level, being exiled from America probably violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. (Somebody PLEASE tell Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions that.) But there are a number of states that still have exile statutes on the books.”

Did you miss your chance to buy the Dick Cheney autographed waterboard kit?

“How Warner Brothers Resisted a Hollywood Ban on Anti-Nazi Films in the 1930s and Warned Americans of the Dangers of Fascism”.

“We stopped keeping statistics on the number of Native moms and babies that are lost in our region; it was just too upsetting.”

“Before we lose our minds entirely, let’s try to remember that approval among partisans used to be something no one took seriously. No one. Why? Because they’re your people. Of course, they approve of what you’re doing! Anyway, even when your people like you, that doesn’t help when faced with an election favoring the out-party. Seth Masket pointed out this morning that George W. Bush and Barack Obama were hella-popular among partisans in 2006 and 2010, and look how much good it did them.”

“Identity theft protection firm LifeLock — a company that’s built a name for itself based on the promise of helping consumers protect their identities online — may have actually exposed customers to additional attacks from ID thieves and phishers. The company just fixed a vulnerability on its site that allowed anyone with a Web browser to index email addresses associated with millions of customer accounts, or to unsubscribe users from all communications from the company.”

“Roseanne who?”

“We tend to think of American history as a slow unfolding of rights over time – with the imposition of Jim Crow in the 1880s and 1890s, a major step backwards, as a sort of historical anomaly. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, that’s simply not the case. But what I took from Down’s article is that in many ways voting restrictionism focused on immigrants is the most consistent through-line to the battle over the vote through our history. It predates the Civil War, which in some way interrupts it. It returns with a vengeance after the Civil War. And it both inspires and assists the disenfranchisement of Southern blacks after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in the late 1870s.”

“On two separate but related matters that converge with this new allegation, the president and his team have been caught repeatedly lying. First, the White House in July 2017 offered false stories about the Trump Tower meeting, only to have to promptly admit they were incorrect. Second, the Trump team repeatedly insisted that the president was unaware of payments to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, two women who allege affairs with him. But a tape released by Cohen shows Trump was aware of the plan to buy McDougal’s story and suffocate it, while Trump acknowledged reimbursing Cohen after his payment to Daniels.”

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