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GELFAND’S WORLD Major League Baseball just announced that it is moving this year s All Star game away from Atlanta, Georgia due to the new law that changes election rules.
Voting rights groups all over the country have been up in arms about the issue and support the MLB action. The item in the law that has been inspiring the most headlines is the one that forbids outsiders from providing food or water to the voters who get stuck in long voting lines. (Technically it is a general prohibition on gifts to voters waiting in line.)
This part of the law is either a rare mistake putting in something so egregious as to incite anger and contempt all over the country or it is a declaration of a new Jim Crow, once again loud and blatant and taunting to all people of good will. If it is the latter, which I suspect is the intent on the part of at least some Georgia legislators, it is something that cannot be left unchallenged. This country may have a lot of
GELFAND’S WORLD One day a year, the nearly 2000 neighborhood council activists in LA have a chance to come together under the same roof and share their war stories.
At least it has been that way for most of the past twenty years. But this year, things may be grinding to a halt, not due to the pandemic, but due to personalities. The strange part of the story is that highly paid city staffers and the chair of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners have intervened in their own fumbling way, but have been incapable of bringing the issue to a settlement.