Thursday, June 4, 2015

Hillary Clinton Speaks About Voting Rights

2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked about voting rights in a speech delivered at Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston, Texas on Thursday.

Clinton proposed Americans be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, unless they opt out, one of a series of voting-law changes she said would expand access to the ballot box. In her remarks to the audience she accused Republicans of making voting harder, particularly for minorities and young people.

Clinton called out Republicans who control the Texas Legislature for enacting a restrictive election law requiring voters to show one of a very limited selection of government photo I.D. cards with the intention of denying ballot access to certain minority voters who do not hold any of those identification cards.

Clinton also called on Congress to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.


Hillary Clinton at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas Thursday
c-span video

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Texas' Wind Energy Industry Survives 84th Legislature



During the 84th Texas Legislature, Senate Republicans passed a bill that would effectively eliminate Texas’ wind power industry.

With a party line 21-10 vote in April, the Senate sent Senator Troy Fraser's Senate Bill 931, killing Texas' renewable energy incentives, to House lawmakers for consideration. SB931 did not advance on the House calendar and died when the 84th Legislature adjourned on Monday.

Election 2016: Facebook More Important Than TV Ads

The odds are good that you are reading this article because you clicked through a link on Facebook. On Sunday, for example, a day you should be spending time with family/reading Post articles, a third of all traffic to The Fix’s top five posts came through the social networking site. The odds of your having gotten to this article from Facebook are much better the younger you are, given that this article deals with politics.

“Among Millennials,” a new report from Pew Research reads, referring to people born between 1981 and 1996, “Facebook is far and away the most common source for news about government and politics.” Far and away meaning that 61 percent of that group got news about politics or government from the site — about the same percentage as that of baby boomers (1946-1964) got from their local news. And vice-versa: Only 37 percent of millennials got political information from local news, compared to 60 percent of boomers.

There are a few things at play here. The first is that more young people use Facebook. In 2014, Pew found, 87 percent of those ages 18 to 29 used the site, compared with 56 percent of those over 65 — though that was up 11 percent from the previous year.

The second is that younger people are more likely to consume news from online sources in general. We took Pew’s graph of the most common sources for news for each age group and highlighted the online-centric ones in yellow. Three of the top 10 for millennials are online, two for Gen X, and one — Facebook — for boomers.

Full Article For millennials, Facebook is poised to dominate politics (also everything else) – The Washington Post.