CT Blue

I’ve never been much of a Twitter user, and I very much welcome its possible demise as a result of the Elon Musk wrecking ball. I haven’t gotten around to terminating my account, since I’m a very lazy person, and they likely make it as hard as possible, but I have signed up for the open source, non-profit alternative: Mastodon. It appears to have all the functionality of Twitter but has enough protections built in to avoid becoming the right wing cesspool that Twitter is fast becoming.

I’m still experimenting. I haven’t yet posted anything, but I’m going to post a link to this article as soon as I upload it, mostly just to get myself going. My Mastodon handle is: @ctblue@mastodon.world. You have to choose a server, as there are a lot of them scattered all over the world, but you still have access to Mastodoners everywhere. I recommend it to anyone not wishing to massage the egos of billionaires.

One of the folks I’m following is George Takei, of Star Trek fame (if, like me, you’re old enough to remember the original series). He “reblogged” (I guess it makes sense that they can’t use “retweeted”) a post from a guy named Jay Kuo, about election denialism in Arizona. I thought’s I’d pass this along from Kuo’s piece, since this post has to have some sort of subject.

Kuo relates that there are a couple of counties in Arizona, with whack-a-doodle majorities on their election boards that have threatened to refuse to certify their results in accordance with state law. One has caved, but the other has not, though neither has come up with a legitimate reason for the threat. Here’s what I thought was sort of funny:

In a twist of irony, if the 47,000 Cochise county votes were ultimately are excluded from the final official tally, that would flip Arizona House District Six and the state schools’ chief winner from Republican to Democrat, earning the GOP a truly karmic result. The exclusion of so many votes is highly unlikely; most election lawyers view the case as open and shut and expect the courts to compel the Cochise County supervisors to perform their ministerial duties and certify the damn election results

You have to suspect that the election denials and the voter suppression tactics of the fascist party have, in many instances, dampened their own voter turnout. It would seem, for instance, that mail in voting would be a natural for its aging base and telling people their vote won’t count is hardly a good way to get them to the polls. They are likely betting that they come out as net winners, but one must wonder. Who knows how this last election would have turned out had the Republicans not killed so many of their voters by discouraging them from getting vaccinated.