monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Why does everyone keep responding to the fuckwit.

Rush Limbaugh praises the president for being “clever” in sharing conspiracy theories

Limbaugh: “Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames”

...But the thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way. And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.

The key line:

"Limbaugh: “Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames”"

Trump expected to sign executive order that could threaten punishment against Facebook, Google and Twitter over allegations of political bias
Tony Romm, Josh Dawsey 15 mins ago






How the states rank in coronavirus cases

Jobless claims rise by more than 2M

Trump expected to sign executive order that could threaten punishment against Facebook, Google and Twitter over allegations of political bias





President Trump is preparing to sign an executive order Thursday that could roll back the immunity that tech giants have for the content on their sites, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Click to expand







00:00
01:12




Trump’s directive chiefly seeks to embolden federal regulators to rethink a portion of law known as Section 230, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a document that could still evolve and has not been officially signed by the president. That law spares tech companies from being held liable for the comments, videos and other content posted by users on their platforms.

The law is controversial. It allows tech companies the freedom to police their platforms for abuse without fear of lawsuits. But critics say those exceptions have also allowed some of Silicon Valley’s most profitable companies to skirt responsibility for the harmful content that flourishes on their online platforms, including hate speech, terrorist propaganda and election-related falsehoods.
Subscribe to the Post Most newsletter: Today’s most popular stories on The Washington Post
The order would prompt federal officials to open a proceeding to reconsider the scope of the law, the people familiar with the document said. A change could mean potentially dramatic free-speech implications and wide-ranging consequences for a broad swath of companies reliant on doing business on the Internet.
The order would also seek to channel complaints about political bias to the Federal Trade Commission, which would be encouraged to probe whether tech companies’ content-moderation policies are in keeping with their pledges of neutrality. It would also require federal agencies to review their spending on social media advertising, according to the people familiar with the White House’s thinking.
“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online,” according to an undated draft version of the executive order obtained by The Washington Post late Wednesday.
The wide-ranging order comes two days after Twitter took the rare step of labeling one of the president’s tweets and linking viewers to news articles that fact-checked his claims. The move infuriated Trump and his supporters, who quickly blasted Twitter and its peers in Silicon Valley for engaging in censorship and exhibiting political bias. The companies have long denied those charges.
The executive order has gone through multiple iterations in recent years, and it may still change, the people said. The order would task the Commerce Department with petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to open a proceeding on Section 230.
Even so, it would be up to the FCC and the FTC, two independent agencies operating outside the president’s Cabinet, to determine exact courses of action once Trump signs it.
The order will mark the White House’s most significant salvo against Silicon Valley after years of verbal broadsides and regulatory threats from Trump and his top deputies. It also may raise fresh, thorny questions about the First Amendment, the future of expression online and the extent to which the White House can properly — and legally — influence the decisions that private companies make about their apps, sites and services.
The White House declined to comment. A White House spokesperson told reporters earlier Wednesday that the president would sign an executive order “pertaining to social media” on Thursday but did not provide further details.
Trump later in the evening again charged that the tech industry sought to “censor” conservatives in the approach to the 2020 election.
The FCC and the FTC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Facebook did not have immediate comment. Twitter declined to comment, as did YouTube, which is part of Google-owner Alphabet.
Trump is one of social media’s most prolific, influential users. He’s armed with a Twitter account that reaches more than 80 million people and a campaign war chest that has made the president one of the most pervasive advertisers on Facebook and Google. But he is also one of the Web’s most controversial voices. He has previously shared and tweeted posts, photos and videos that appear to run afoul of major tech companies’ guidelines that prohibit or discourage harmful, abusive or false content.

© Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn upon his return to the White House in Washington, D.C. on May 27.
For years, Twitter in particular largely allowed Trump to share his views unfettered anyway, saying that even his most controversial tweets were in the public interest. Fierce blowback eventually forced Twitter to reconsider its hands-off approach, culminating in the company’s first-ever attempt Tuesday to label the president’s tweets about mail-in ballots.
Trump responded by claiming that major social media companies are biased, threatening to “strongly regulate, or close them down” in response.
Until this week, Trump had issued only threats to regulate or penalize Facebook, Google-owned YouTube and Twitter over a range of claims, even suggesting at one point that the industry tried to undermine his election. Previously, however, the White House has backed down, even shelving prior versions of its executive order targeting social media companies.
In July, the president convened a “social media summit” at the White House featuring GOP lawmakers and Republican strategists, an event seen at the time as a precursor for further action to come. The event drew sharp rebukes from digital experts and congressional Democrats, who said Trump had used the backdrop of the White House to condone some of his supporters’ most provocative, controversial online tactics.
That same month, the Justice Department opened a wide-ranging review of the tech industry, which since has blossomed into a full inquiry on Section 230. Repeatedly, Attorney General William P. Barr has raised the possibility that the U.S. government could seek changes to the rules. “No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts,” Barr said in a speech this February, reflecting on the origin of the statute. “They have become titans.”
Republican lawmakers also say that Facebook, Google and Twitter should be held accountable for perceived political bias, a call echoed by White House officials.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the fact-check label applied to Trump’s tweet, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg engaged in a public battle over censoring content late Wednesday.
Zuckerberg appeared on Fox News, saying that he didn’t believe digital platforms should act as the “arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”
Later that night, Dorsey lashed back at Zuckerberg in a series of tweets, saying that Twitter would continue would to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally.
But, he added, “This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ ”
Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

Continue Reading
Show full articles without "Continue Reading" button for 24 hours.




AdChoices

How the states rank in coronavirus cases
24/7 Wall St.

I Spied On A Supermodel While She Slept. What I Found Out Changed My Hair And Skin Forever
Ad Blissy

Bad state data hides threat as Trump pushes reopening
POLITICO

'Stop killing black people': Minn. man's death sparks protests across US
USA TODAY

The prettiest town in every state
The Daily Meal

Average savings over $750 for new customers who save? Word.
Ad Progressive | Auto Insurance Quotes

Get the latest coronavirus news from your state
Microsoft News

Brady, Bundchen’s son crashes TikTok challenge
ETonline

Warren VP bid faces obstacle: Her state's GOP governor
The Hill

Kitten’s Reaction To Meeting His New Family Is Incredible
Ad Obsev

What people wore the year you were born
Marie Claire

Police: Johnson aide may have violated lockdown
The Guardian

Rose addresses 'Batwoman' exit in cryptic post
Entertainment Weekly

Remember This Actress? This Is How She Looks Now
Ad PensAndPatron

More From The Washington Post
Visit site



© 2020 Microsoft

My nominee for the most misleading and hazardous sentence in American politics: President Trump is a populist.

Yes, he loves to sound like a populist. He draws angry lines of division between a nasty, mask-wearing, church-hating, science-worshiping elite and the good, plain folks who support him. But this man who spends a lot of time in a golf cart at his resorts for the ultrarich is about as populist as the people paying his membership dues.

It has been widely and correctly observed that Trump is doing all he can to distract attention from his mishandling of the covid-19 crisis. But much of what he’s up to is consistent with a longer-term effort to mask the truth about his presidency: His policies resolutely favor the wealthy and the connected over the working class whose banner he claims to carry. He wants the media and the public to talk about anything except the main story line.

He would have us argue incessantly about mask-wearing and pay no attention to reports such as Pro Publica’s revelation last month that, even as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has been inundated with covid-19-related complaints, the agency has issued a series of guidelines that roll back safety standards and virtually eliminate non-health care workers from government protection.”

“Opening up the economy” sounds good. But in Trump’s hands, it means: “Go back to work, and don’t expect anyone in our administration to worry about your health — or your life.”

He would much rather have us fighting about whether houses of worship should be open than focusing on the rise of hunger and his party’s resolute refusal to expand the food stamp program to alleviate suffering.

Trump and his supporters love to demonize — falsely, it should be said — scientists and other “experts” for their alleged indifference to unemployment even as he and his party slow-walk further action to save jobs. Congress should be rushing aid to states and localities to prevent mass layoffs of teachers, first responders and other civil servants. But Trump and the GOP Senate act as if there were all the time in the world.

nd he surely doesn’t want Congress or the inspectors general he keeps firing to look into cronyism or failures in the business rescue programs. Nor does he want states to make it easier for people to vote in the middle of a pandemic. So he issues wildly indecent (and debunked) smears against MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and threatens social media companies that call out his lies.

Let’s call it Brand X populism. It sometimes looks and sounds like the real thing. But, like Brand X in the old television commercials, it is a defective product, as dangerous to our collective well-being as hydroxychloroquine is to victims of covid-19.

Trump needs to be called out for both forms of hucksterism. And those who would advance policies that are genuinely beneficial to workers, the middle class, the excluded and the marginalized also need to stop playing Trump’s game.

There’s a habit among some liberals, partly imported from Europe, to use the word “populist” as a synonym for “authoritarian.” But this ignores the history of democratic and progressive forms of populism. It also concedes to those on the radical right exactly what they want: the mantle of representing “the people” against “the elites” — even when they, like Trump, defend the privileged and the plutocrats.

It’s also a mistake to pretend that the issue of wearing masks divides us by party or ideology. Actually, it splits only the Republican Party, as Michael Scherer helpfully pointed out Wednesday in The Post. Yes, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 89 percent of Democrats favor mask-wearing outside the home — but 58 percent of Republicans do, too.

So when Trump mocked former vice president Joe Biden for wearing a mask, his Democratic foe dubbed the president “an absolute fool.” Biden was speaking not only for his own party but also for our country’s vast majority.

And can we please exercise some care in talking about the yearning of many religious people to return to their houses of worship? It’s absolutely true that crowded church services are, for now, very dangerous. It’s also true that, in large numbers, pastors and other religious leaders know this.

The Bishops of the Washington State Catholic Conference, for example, issued a statement last Friday saying they had suspended the public celebration of Mass “not out of fear, but out of our deepest respect for human life and health.” Don’t let Trump, of all people, polarize the religious against the secular.

The most resonant words in our Constitution are the first three: “We the people.” No demagogue should be allowed to hijack them.

Mike Pompeo Is the Worst Secretary of State Ever

Where’s the Republican uproar over what’s gone on under his watch?

Quote:

If you thought the volume on the Trump-Twitter-Fox noise distraction machine was turned up extra loud in the past few weeks, it was not only to deflect attention from the nearly 100,000 Americans who’ve died from Covid-19, but also from the confirmation that on President Trump’s watch our country suffered the first deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 that was planned abroad.

You read that right. Last week, Attorney General William Barr and the F.B.I. said that data from cellphones of a Saudi Air Force trainee who killed three U.S. sailors and wounded eight others at a Navy air base in Pensacola, Fla., on Dec. 6 confirmed that it was an act of foreign-planned “terrorism.”

The phone data “definitively establishes” that the trainee, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, had “significant ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — not only before the attack, but before he even arrived in the United States” in August 2017. He had actually joined the Saudi military to carry out a “special operation.”

That Alshamrani was able to kill three sailors at an American base was a massive failure of U.S. and Saudi intelligence. I mean, who should be getting more scrutinized before they come train in the U.S. on an air base than Saudi pilots?

The Trump administration clearly had no idea what was happening under its nose.

As The Washington Post noted: After the attack, investigators found evidence that 17 fellow Saudi students “had shared Islamist militant or anti-American material on social media, and others had possessed or shared child pornography. As a result, 21 cadets from Saudi Arabia were disenrolled from the training program and sent home.”

That sort of intelligence failure — the first foreign-planned terrorist attack on U.S. shores since 9/11 — is something you’d expect Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to be particularly upset about. After all, it was Pompeo, when he was in Congress, who spearheaded the investigations into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s supposed responsibility for the death of four U.S. diplomats in a terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

Oh, you forgot about Congressman Pompeo’s endless campaign to nail Hillary with Benghazi? Well, let me jog your memory. Here is how The Guardian described the conclusion of the 800-page, House select committee investigation on Benghazi, led by a Republican representative, Trey Gowdy, and issued on July 28, 2016:

It “found no new evidence to conclude that Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time, was culpable in the deaths.” A few hours later, the Obama White House “noted tersely that this was the eighth congressional committee to investigate the attacks and went on longer than the 9/11 commission and the committees designated to look at Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the Iran-contra affair and Watergate.”

So, let’s do some math here: Then-Congressman Pompeo led the utterly contrived campaign to blame Hillary for the Benghazi deaths — a charge that a Republican-led committee found to be without merit. But Pompeo used his crusade to gain the attention, via Fox News, of Trump and was named Trump’s C.I.A. director. And now we learn that while Pompeo was C.I.A. director, the first foreign-planned terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 was being organized here and abroad, and while he was secretary of state it was carried out.

Now that’s something worth investigating.

I don’t know much about Pompeo’s time as head of the C.I.A., except that he was notorious for spending long hours at the White House sucking up to Trump. But I do know he has been the worst secretary of state in American history, without a single diplomatic achievement.

I know you thought that Rex Tillerson had retired that title. Tillerson was ineffective, but Tillerson had integrity and ethics. Pompeo has none. American taxpayers deserve a refund from him for his education at West Point.

Pompeo’s two most notable accomplishments as secretary of state are, metaphorically speaking, shooting two of his senior State Department officials in the back.

One was the distinguished U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Pompeo removed on the orders of Trump and Trump’s nut-job lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The other was the department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, whom Pompeo got Trump to fire, reportedly because he was investigating — wait for it now — Pompeo’s own efforts to evade a congressional ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and for improperly asking a State Department employee to run errands for him and his wife.

Hell, if that were me — if the first foreign-planned terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 developed on my watch and if I had just gotten rid of the State Department inspector general without explanation — I’d also be trying to distract attention.

I mean, if it were me, I might even claim that China concocted the coronavirus in a lab in Wuhan. Wait — that’s what Pompeo did!

“There is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo told ABC News’s “This Week” on May 3. “The best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.”

Pompeo has a well-earned reputation for pushing conspiracy theories. I certainly think it is possible that a coronavirus from bats being studied in the Wuhan lab might have escaped by accident. But the “best” expert virologists — and U.S. intelligence agencies — say there’s no proof it was man-made, which would leave DNA tracks.

When Martha Raddatz, the ABC interviewer, told Pompeo that U.S. intelligence has said no such thing, he just reversed course and said: “I’ve seen what the intelligence community has said. I have no reason to believe that they’ve got it wrong.”

What? The secretary of state first accuses China of manufacturing a virus that has killed over 340,000 people worldwide and then, when reminded that our intelligence agencies have concluded no such thing, he backs off with no explanation. Can you be any more unprofessional?

But that’s not the only slimeball story that Pompeo wants to distract attention from. On May 19, NBC News revealed that since 2018 he and his wife, Susan, had held some two dozen “elaborate, unpublicized” dinners “in the historic Diplomatic Reception Rooms on the government’s dime. State Department officials involved in the dinners said they had raised concerns internally that the events were essentially using federal resources to cultivate a donor and supporter base for Pompeo’s political ambitions.”

Pompeo and his wife are widely rumored to harbor White House dreams. And it showed. NBC said “the records show that about 29 percent of the invitees came from the corporate world, while about a quarter of them hailed from the media or entertainment industries, with conservative media members heavily represented. About 30 percent work in politics or government, and just 14 percent were diplomats or foreign officials. Every single member of the House or the Senate who has been invited is a Republican.”

With a president, a Senate majority and Fox News always at the ready to defend him, Pompeo couldn’t care less about any of these stories. He just smirks and marches on. But every American should care. The morale and effectiveness of our State Department — and our standing in the world — are both the worse for him.

nyt/friedman

Is it because there is no one to process the food from farmers and meat packing plants?

In the uplifting stories we tell ourselves, muckraking investigations of corporate misdeeds create a public uproar that leads to the eradication of the abuses exposed.

The coronavirus crisis presents us with a dispiriting counterexample. It’s the meatpacking industry, which was the subject of Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle,” published in 1906.

Descriptions of conditions in modern meat processing plants resemble those depicted by Sinclair. They include workers crammed virtually shoulder-to-shoulder to tend production lines moving at inexorable speeds, high rates of worker disease and injury, low pay and unforgiving rules on time off or meal and bathroom breaks.

I blocked that dipshit years ago.