Mr. “Never Back Down” backs down These Republicans are too much. You wonder if they really think they can win this way and then realize they don’t. They’re just hoping he ends up in jail or embalmed: The leading pro-DeSantis PAC surprised the political world with a single tweet after Donald Trump’s CNN town hall last week. It bluntly called out the former president for his answers on January 6th, his “rigged” election claims, “the sex abuse case” he was found liable for damages over, “his defense of his comments about grabbing women by their genitals,” and investigations into “his stash of taxpayer-owned classified documents.” “How does this Make America Great Again?” the tweet from the official account of Never Back Down concluded. This was the kind of all-out critique of Trump that Ron DeSantis — and most of the 2024 field — have never made themselves. Don’t expect to hear it again, though: The tweet generated some heated internal pushback at Never Back Down, while multiple prominent conservative commentators piled on publicly.
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Here’s a short thread from Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post spelling it out in a nutshell: What’s in this supposedly commonsense bill McCarthy is demanding in exchange for not destroying the global economy? Here’s my handy guide, for those interested in the substance of the legislation and not just political gamesmanship. 1. Unspecified across-the-board cuts to nondefense discretionary spending, down by one-third on average in 2024, after inflation. The cuts would then expand to roughly 59%, on average, by 2033 Does this mean WIC? Border security? Pells? FBI? No one knows https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/25/mccarthy-national-debt-limit-budget/ 2. Defund the tax police – make it harder for IRS to collect taxes legally owed by wealthy/corporate tax cheats, and set back the agency’s other IT upgrades. (Would also increase deficits) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/20/gop-defund-irs-debt-limit/ 3. Medicaid work requirements – which sound nice, but are a solution in search of a problem.
Syrian-American journalist Hekmat Aboukhater traveled across Homs, Lattakia, Tartous, and Aleppo this April, reporting for The Grayzone on the devastating impact of Western economic sanctions on average Syrians. Throughout 2023, a series of anti-Syrian refugee bills, a failing economy, and anti-Syrian rhetoric have deepened the plight of the two million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon. Hate crimes against Syrians suspected of living in the country illegally have skyrocketed, while at least 130 refugees have been deported. Weekly Israeli strikes have […]
The post Immiserated, humiliated, yet resilient: how Syrians survive America’s economic siege appeared first on The Grayzone.
The GOP’s investigations go in circles It’s all BS: [Sen. Chuck Grassley] on Wednesday issued a joint statement with Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) alleging Biden was involved in a “criminal scheme” when he served as vice president that involved a foreign national. The two Republican lawmakers called on the Justice Department to release a 2020 document they claim alleges Biden’s involvement in the scheme. “We believe the FBI possesses an unclassified internal document that includes very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States,” Grassley said in a statement. “The FBI’s recent history of botching politically charged investigations demands close congressional oversight.”The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard But Grassley was singing a different tune on Friday, admitting to Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren that he has no evidence to back his claim, Newsweek reports. “It is a very serious allegation. I wish I could say that I knew it was true or untrue,” the 89-year-old lawmaker told Van Susteren.
Don’t look away… they’re all important now Tomorrow is election day all over the country and Bolts Magazine has provided one of its very handy cheat sheets to follow the important races. I think we have all learned that ignoring the state and local elections is very foolish. Right now that’s where the action is and much of it hasn’t been good for quite some time. Voters across Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and in some areas of Colorado and Florida, will resolve major questions on Tuesday, May 16. Who will control the Pennsylvania state House? Who will be the next mayor of Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, and Jacksonville? Can a state judge who gave Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts one of its brightest legal victories in 2020 score a promotion? Voters will also decide who wields power over Pennsylvania’s criminal legal system, whether conservatives take over more local school boards, whether the Pittsburgh left continues its gains, and whether an election denier topples a secretary of state.
E. Jean Carroll won. I’m glad she won, but I’m still depressed. Why? Because a financial victory against Trump is not enough. As I said on the Nicole Sandler show on Thursday, we know how Trump responds when he loses, so we need to KEEP working to crush him especially after we win. He must be crushed legally, financially, politically and narratively. I could speak generically, “Here’s what we should do.” But I have experience in fighting the right financially, legally, politically and narratively. I think that experience can be applied to the situation now and apply it in the future. Recently I spoke on a panel about my wildly successful work to make the violent rhetoric, racism, sexism and religious bigotry coming from right wing media toxic to mainstream advertisers and less profitable to the distributors of RW media. It was a financial victory, but I kept working to make it a legal, political and narrative victory. I spoke about the narrative and messages that I used that people on our side could get behind and how I taught other groups how to use the Spocko Method.
Via Josh Kraushaar in Axios: “The GOP’s shrinking Senate map.” One of the biggest immediate consequences if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket in 2024: Republicans may campaign aggressively in fewer Senate battleground races. In an interview with CNN last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was cautious about the number of top GOP pickup opportunities — despite a historically favorable map giving the party a strong chance of ending Democrats’ 51–49 majority. “I just spent 10 minutes explaining to you how we could screw this up, and we’re working very hard to not let that happen. Let’s put it that way,” McConnell said. He only listed four Democratic-held seats as top opportunities: West Virginia, Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. If Trump’s endorsements of weak candidates hurt GOP prospects in 2022, it’s the prospect that Trump will lead the GOP presidential ticket that could jeopardize purple-state opportunities in 2024. Yep. It’s not a given that the GOP takes the Senate or keeps the House. Not at all.
Give me that old-time retribution Sublimation: a feature or a bug? One has to wonder with the obsessive attention Americans pay to the sex others are having, to gender nonconformity, and especially to extrajudicial punishment. Brandon Garrett and Gregory Mitchell ponder findings that suggest Americans’ adherence to Sir William Blackstone’s principle that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer” is slipping. If their faith in due process was ever there. Researchers asked if at trial it was worse if an innocent was convicted, a guilty person went free, or if both were equally bad. (Slate): Most respondents answered that the errors were equally bad. Our first results showing widespread rejection of the Blackstone ratio were so surprising and potentially disruptive that we tested their robustness multiple times, using a series of large samples drawn from the entire U.S. population and multiple measurement methods. Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false acquittals and false convictions to be equally bad outcomes.
“Not who we are” meets “who we are” Talking Points Memo reports that two staffers in Rep. Paul Gosar’s office have close ties to Nick Fuentes’ white-supremacist “Groyper” movement: TPM has uncovered an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the “ChickenRight” and “Chikken” handles that can be linked to Wade Searle, who works as the digital director for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), one of the most extreme, far-right members of Congress. ChickenRight’s posting on far-right websites and Searle’s alleged involvement with Fuentes occurred before and after he started working in Gosar’s Capitol Hill office. Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment. Well. You could have knocked over MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan with a feather. Not to mention his being “shocked” by Sen.
I did research as part of my graduate work in human-computer interaction at Georgia Tech. I focused on incremental improvements to the Mastodon user interface to focus on personal relationships. I’m presenting the prototypes and data that I developed here in summary. There’s also a 45-minute video where I go over the research in detail … Continue reading Re-designing the Mastodon User Interface for Better Personal Relationships