Senate results are harshest slap at Bush

AlterNet
and
 Bob Geiger
November 08, 2006

Jane Hamsher says it best at Firedoglake this morning as she weighs in with this gem: "The most powerful woman in US history. Two words guaranteed to reduce any wingnut to a puddle of piss — Speaker Pelosi."

As MSNBC's Chris Matthews might say, "Ha!"

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a nice ring to it as well.

And while the stunning Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives is absolutely huge, the biggest repudiation of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and their whole corrupt, sick agenda, is what will be a glorious 51-49 Democratic majority in the United States Senate.

Simply looking at nominations made by the executive branch illustrates the enormity of the filtering mechanism that the Senate is suppose to represent and how things will change now that Congress's upper chamber will no longer simply take everything coming out of the White House and allow it to pass like a hot knife through butter.

The incredibly ill-advised appointment of John Bolton to be America's chief diplomat at the United Nations would have been killed quickly with a Democratic majority, instead of being blocked by filibuster, which ultimately led to Bush defying Congress and installing Bolton in a recess appointment.

ACLU By ACLUSponsored

Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

What you can do:
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