Seriously??? Trump is honest and trustworthy enough to run the most powerful country in the world but you couldn’t trust him or his people to do business with your software company. Is this guy for real? These people are so far gone it’s beyond all reason. Luckily, this cipher isn’t going to be in the race very long but it’s instructive to hear him speak anyway. They are all so tribal that they are willing to twist themselves into pretzels to stay in the GOP fold for Dear Leader but grasp at these straws to show that they are somehow different. It’s pathetic. I hope you enjoy looking in the mirror Bergum. If it looks a little bit distorted, check your conscience.
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Here’s my bold statement for 2023: Social media companies in the United States need to be regulated. Before you start agreeing and explain why it’ll never happen… you should know Meta didn’t launch Threads in the EU. Because of the EU’s REGULATION. It would have led to massive NEW fines and Meta doesn’t want MORE massive fines. It was recently hit with an order to stop sending EU users data to the US for processing and was fined almost $1.3BN for breaching the GDPR’s requirements on data export. When companies’ actions or inactions harm the public, the public demands something be done. In the EU they’ve recognized the harm being done by social media companies and enacted regulation. Short term, companies pay the fine and change their behavior to stop new fines. This is what we want, what the public deserves. Protection from harm. Here’s a good piece by Natasha Lomas’ in Tech Cruch that spells out Meta’s current privacy problems and reminds us of the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, sending a strong sign of Democratic unity from one of the party’s most liberal members. “I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the “Pod Save America” podcast Thursday. “I do think that there are ebbs and flows.” Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist from New York, has sometimes bucked Biden and the party’s leaders, including voting against the deal the president negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and casting the lone Democratic vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating and avoid a partial government shutdown. She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and demurred in an interview last year when asked if she would support the incumbent president in 2024. Biden is facing nominal primary challenges for next year’s election in self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The denialists will never, ever accept climate change The world is burning up right now with temperatures soaring even in places like the arctic. The scientific consensus is that this is caused by climate change and common sense can tell any yokel on the street that this is not normal. However, the wingnuts will never accept this presumably because they either care more about their fossil fuel portfolios or they care more about owning the libs than anything else in this world. Here’s an example from Paul Hindraker (aka Hindrocket for those of you who remember the good old days of blogging.) This last week, the press has been full of alarmist headlines: Tuesday was the hottest day ever! No, Wednesday was the hottest day ever! Of course, you have to 1) define “ever,” and 2) believe that we have any idea what the average temperature is, over the whole Earth, on a particular day–let alone a particular day 1,000 years ago. At Watts Up With That?, Paul Homewood comments: Then there is this: Wait, what? I didn’t know they had SUVs 125,000 years ago. What made it warm then? You’re not supposed to ask.
It isn’t really news that Donald Trump tried to “weaponize” the federal government against his political enemies. After all, he did it right out in the open many, many times. Here’s just one example from October of 2020, before the election: Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough. Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration. “Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!” How about this?
Apparently, he wants to bring fascism faster: “By refusing to speak to the needs of the poor and working people, the Democratic Party helps to facilitate and enable the Trumps and the DeSantises and others. So, you end up with neo-fascism being in some ways dependent on neoliberalism and vice versa. That cycle, going around and around, means that we’re going to end up with fascism sooner or later. Every Democratic administration will just be a caretaker and a postponement for fascism to come. I am profoundly anti-fascist, and therefore I am trying to get at the roots of fascism.” Right, yeah. That makes sense. Sure it does. Meanwhile he’s running as the Green Party candidate and will probably be on the ballot in the swing states. And he could easily siphon off enough votes to put Donald Trump back in the white house. That’s how we’ll get at the roots of fascism? I hope the Democrats take this threat seriously. Quite a few people think that protest votes are their way of sticking it to the powers that be. But the people who will be hurt won’t be those in power.
Speaking of fascism: Former President Trump said Friday for the first time publicly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would bring back a travel ban “even bigger than before,” alluding to his administration’s restrictions on travelers from heavily Muslim countries. The first two bans faced steep challenges in court, but the third version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 2018. That ban barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries, in addition to North Korea and Venezuela. President Biden signed an executive order reversing the ban his first week in office. Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told his audience. “Well, how did that work out? We had no problem, right? They knew they couldn’t come here if they had that moniker. They couldn’t come here.” “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers.
It literally doesn’t get any dumber than this Terri Otten at TNR: She’s a Barbie comrade, in a Communist Barbie world—or so say Republicans, who are doubling down on accusations that the upcoming Barbie movie is Chinese propaganda. The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea. Senator Ted Cruz was one of the first U.S. lawmakers to weigh in, sarcastically tweeting, “I guess Barbie is made in China…” Fox News commentators speculated outright whether Barbie was Communist or not. More Republicans have joined them.
Burn it down and start from scratch? It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans do not know much about what their government does or why or who is in charge. Fewer than half can name all three branches of government. A quarter cannot name even one. Philip Bump wrote recently, “On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot.” But there is lots of governement waste, fraud, and abuse squirreled away somewhere that should be eliminated so we can lower taxes. They’re sure of that. Like this genius Vivek Ramaswamy who wants to eliminate 75% of career federal employees. People we’ve trained to know their jobs. People who know important shit most Americans aren’t even aware is being done. Yeah, those people have got to go. I sat down recently with a grade-school friend I had not seen since I was maybe 15. He was retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’d captained vessels and flown planes as part of the agency’s data-gathering efforts. I asked if he’d read “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis.
No SNL cold open. Season’s over and writers are on strike. Politico: A Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee concluded Friday that Rudy Giuliani should be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” efforts to derail the 2020 presidential election in support of former President Donald Trump. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the three-member panel declared in a 38-page decision. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”