USpolitics

Pardons for members of government for actions they took from the seat of government just removes the public's ability to hold our government accountable. We already have too little accountability.

Further because pardons are more likely to be political in nature it allows for a regime to entirely protect themselves when and if they commit abuses of power.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s final press conference was interrupted on Thursday by two journalists who blasted him over the US’s support for Israel's war on Gaza before they were forcibly removed from the State Department's press briefing room.

"Why did you keep the bombs flowing?” Max Blumenthal, editor of the Grayzone, an online news site, shouted at Blinken from the back of the press room. “Why did you sacrifice the rules-based order on the mantle of your commitment to Zionism?”

“You helped destroy our religion Judaism by associating it with fascism…your father-in-law was an Israel lobbyist, your grandfather was an Israel lobbyist…Why did you allow the holocaust of our time to happen? How does it feel to let your legacy be genocide?”

As Blumenthal reached the door, he appeared to direct his screams at Matthew Miller, the outgoing spokesman for the US State Department. “You too Matt,” he shouted. “You smirked through the whole thing every day. You smirked through a genocide.”

Husseini continued shouting, mentioning Israel’s “nuclear weapons”, then saying, “I was sitting here quietly and now I’m being manhandled by two or three people,” referring to security guards who physically carried him out of the room.

"Criminal! Why aren’t you in the Hague?” referring to the city where the International Criminal Court is located.

The Biden administration has faced criticism from pro-Palestinian activists, scholars and human rights organisations over its support for Israel since the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel.

Asked by one reporter if he had any regrets about not enforcing red lines on Israel, Blinken said the Biden administration’s policies “were basically supported by an overwhelming majority of Israelis after the trauma of October 7”.

The Chinese make about half the apps on the Apple app store. Probably more in the Android store. All of them are just as able to be spyware as TikTok is. In fact more so. The amount of Wireshark TikTok has been exposed to and will continue to be exposed to is far more than the various obscure apps you have. Half of which or known to be Chinese. A half of the remaining could be the Chinese using a straw developer in another country. Any of the for certain Chinese ones have the same obligation to share data with the government TikTok has.

If they ban TikTok and only TikTok the only differentiating factor it has verse a large number of allowed apps is the speech they've allowed. This would be congress singling out a single company for punishment over speech it has allowed others to do. IDK. Maybe TikTok would have a case in the courts.

Some say "yeah, but TikTok is a larger company more capable of doing shady processing of the data they receive on the back end." What with their algorithms! We don't know what these "smaller" companies back ends look like. If they are a state sponsored data collection their back end processing could be just as capable. Heck they could just raw dog the data sharing and give everything to the Chinese government and then their government could apply whatever sophistication is claimed TikTok has exclusive access to.

Banning TikTok because it's Chinese while China is the single largest app source in general makes no logical sense. Maybe we shouldn't have a bunch of Chinese apps on a device with a mic that's always on and always with us. Maybe there are exploits I'm not aware of that could make that dangerous. But if that's a problem let's fix that. Banning one single app that congress decided they don't like wouldn't fix that anyway.

It's like arresting someone exclusively for being at Walmart, no other details, which is not a crime, while at least half the other people at Walmart are also at Walmart.

Make it make sense!!!

Archive Link: https://archive.is/0VaHa

Donald Trump has shared inflammatory video content calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch” just weeks after the Israeli leader claimed the two had a “very friendly, warm” discussion about hostage negotiations and Syria policy.

The president-elect posted the clip to Truth Social featuring economist Jeffrey Sachs, who accuses Netanyahu of manipulating US foreign policy and orchestrating “endless wars” in the Middle East.

“[Netanyahu’s] gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in US politics, he’s gotten his way,” Sachs says in the interview, referring to the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups.

His pick for secretary of state, the Florida senator Marco Rubio, opposes a Gaza ceasefire and has called for Israel to “destroy every element” of Hamas. His choice for UN ambassador, the New York representative Elise Stefanik, has dismissed the United Nations as a “cesspool of antisemitism” for its criticism of civilian deaths in Gaza.

Trump’s selection for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has rejected the common diplomatic terminology regarding occupied Palestinian territories. “There’s no such thing as a West Bank,” Huckabee said during a 2017 visit to Israel. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, had previously said “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian”.

Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is also an evangelical Christian whose tattoos of crusader-associated symbols have raised eyebrows in diplomatic circles.

During Trump’s first term, he delivered significant diplomatic wins for Netanyahu, including recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019 and supporting the Abraham accords with Gulf states. This past summer, Trump hosted Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago during the prime minister’s US trip.

“I do not know Trump’s disposition on these issues, but I do very much hope that he frees US foreign policy from the grip of the cruel, ineffective, illegal and destructive policies of Netanyahu,” he said.

The Los Angeles Fire Department knew it was severely underfunded long before this fire. “We don't have enough firefighters and medics, we don't have enough fire engines, we don't have enough trucks and ambulances in the field,” Freddy Escobar, an LAFD Captain II told the city during his testimony at a budget hearing on May 1, 2024. “And we don't have the equipment and staffing that we need to respond to half a million emergency calls for service every year,” added Escobar, who is union president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City (UFLAC).

The LAFD will likely go over budget this year, with an estimated $920 million total expenditure in fiscal year 2024-25. However, this is nowhere near a $50 million increase compared to the 2023-24 total expenditure at $903.8 million — they had to spend $66 million more than the city budgeted for.

With emergency calls on the rise and equipment outdated, the department has more large one-time purchases to make in 2024-25. The LAFD will again have to spend over budget to meet their needs. In a July memo, Chief Crowley addressed the likely overspending, with total expenditure estimated at $920 million in 2024-25. The chief emphasized that this year’s budget cut deleted, “onetime funding in various spending accounts.” As a result, the over budget spending will include, “new fleet purchases,” a one-time expense that is likely to exceed $50 million.

The fire department's resources and personnel are spread thin partially because of the homeless crisis in Los Angeles. “We are on the frontlines of this homeless crisis,” said Captain Freddy Escobar. “Fifty percent of the fires we respond to come from our homeless population. And the city reportedly spends $1.3 billion each year on homeless programs, but the LAFD is scheduled to receive a $23 million cut? This makes absolutely no sense,” he told the budget committee back in May.

Arichive Link: https://archive.is/B5AaI

About Drop Site:

Independent news on politics and war. Founded by Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, and veterans of The Intercept.^[[1] https://www.dropsitenews.com/about]

https://archive.is/Bd7QQ

He's the only Republican member of congress not controlled by Isreal. All other Republicans have an AIPAC minder that they call their "AIPAC guy" that they obey. On every vote they think, well what does my AIPAC guy think. I'll just do what he says. Thomas Massie got rid of his. He's openly critical of Israel's genocide of Palestinians.

Now Mike Johnson is potentially going to loose the speakership because he needs 50% of the votes and it is assumed that the democrats all vote against the Republican speaker. So really he needs 95%+ of the Republican votes. Literally two nay votes is enough. And Thomas Massie isn't voting for him because of the whole Israel thing.

If a few of the Isreal critical Democrats were to back Thomas Massie we could end up with a Speaker of the House that has no problem talking about how it's corrupt that we give Israel money when we have problems here just to have them use the money to create more problems there.

In the wake of recent events a widespread disgust with the behavior of corporations has been in the spotlight. Why do companies act? Mostly 'for the shareholders.' This is why Twitter is no more, why openAI is an empty husk, and possibly why our planet is headed towards a climate disaster.

Note this Ferengi-esque drive to profit is entrenched in our model of a corporation: It's entire purpose is profit. When we think of a corporation acting in the interest of it's shareholders we only think of actions that result in profit in dividends or stock prices.

Why is this the only way corporations act in the interest of shareholders? Because shareholders, owners, only take financial risk when owning a corporation. Owners are inherently protected from the consequences of corporate actions.

Corporations commit crime. It happens, and it is difficult to pin down who is ultimately responsible for these crimes. Sometimes it is an employee who truly is responsible, but sometimes the company itself created the conditions requiring employees to break the law and sometimes the company decides the penalty is worth the profit.

Imagine how the balance of competing interests would change if instead of treating owners as disinterested observers, responsibility for all corporate actions was evenly divided by ownership stake. Fines, asset seizure, court orders, prison sentences, felon status all trickling up to those ultimately responsible: owners. The best interest of shareholders would no longer be limited to maximizing profit, but also minimizing prosecution risk.

This would not stop bad actors entirely, but would remove one of the evolutionary pressures that selects for their success.

Since Kamala Harris’s catastrophic electoral defeat last month—the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate has gotten the most votes in a U.S. election—a lot of criticism has been focused on the campaign’s message. That criticism is warranted, and long before Election Day, this publication had been among those warning that Harris was failing to effectively counter Trump’s populist appeal. But a campaign is not just a candidate and a message. It is also an organization, one with a budget and staff that makes decisions about actions that can be taken to transmit the message and convince people to turn out for the candidate. And any election postmortem needs to analyze Harris’s operation in addition to her words.

The New York Times, for instance, has reported that even as the Harris campaign splurged on celebrity-filled events (including paying Oprah’s production company $1 million), in Philadelphia, many of the field offices “were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said,” with city campaign staffers “being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently.” That is when they even had field offices, and in many predominantly Black neighborhoods “campaign staff members were operating out of public parks, grocery-store parking lots and church basements.” A volunteer told the Times: “There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts… There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”

Even when there were T-shirts, they could be slapdash (one box of them said “Harriz-Walz”). A “get-out-the-vote bus tour for [Pennsylvania’s] Black mayors” had its funding pulled without explanation. The head of a pro-Harris group “recounted frantic campaign staff members in Philadelphia, Detroit and North Carolina calling him in the final weeks of the race to say they did not have enough money to provide food or water to volunteers.” In Georgia, a county party chair “said the Harris campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation had been nonexistent, even as he had pleaded for resources.” Black staff members reportedly felt that the Black vote was being taken for granted, and when they aired their complaints in a post-election call, Harris’s deputy campaign manager “told staff members that talking to the press would ruin their career prospects.” There appears to have been racism in the allocation of resources, with the campaign deliberately choosing to more heavily fund operations in white suburbs and neglecting Black urban centers. (Perhaps on the theory that the Democrats had already successfully appeased Black voters by selecting a Black woman.) Organizers “said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods” and instead were turned “into glorified telemarketers.” As a result, Harris staffers resorted to going rogue and setting up their own unauthorized operations in a desperate attempt to get out the Black vote.

Some of this seems to have been simply bad decision-making. Harris made the same error that Hillary Clinton did in 2016, deploying resources in states like Texas that she was clearly not going to win that could have instead been used in states she desperately needed to win. “We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former DNC consultant told Puck. They even bought an expensive TV ad in Florida, a state Harris knew she wouldn’t win, just to “troll” Donald Trump. Other aspects make the Harris campaign look like little more than a multi-level marketing scheme. For instance, they spent “$111 million in online ads seeking donations,” in other words ads asking for money to pay for more ads asking for money! I was struck over this campaign season by how many texts I got just pleading with me urgently to SEND MORE MONEY. I never did, even though I did not want Trump to win the election, because I had zero confidence that the money would actually end up being spent on anything useful. Turns out, this lack of confidence was fully justified, because your donation might well have gone to a drone show production company, or Oprah’s staff, or to pointlessly build a set for a podcast (which reportedly cost $100,000 yet had “cardboard walls,” raising the question of who got the money), or just toward sending you even more texts. What it did not go toward, apparently, was adequately funding field offices in Black neighborhoods.

...All they know how to do is demand money and spend it on nonsense, like a big light-up sphere or a concert with celebrities. It is not quite a scam on the level of Bernie Madoff or the crypto industry, but it is certainly a kind of fraud, because it relies on convincing good people to part with their money, thinking they are paying for one kind of thing when they may in fact be paying for something they wouldn’t want to fund if they understood where the money goes. It’s deceptive and wrong, and I suspect we haven’t heard the last of the damning reports about how spectacularly this campaign failed.

P.S.: Sabby Sabbs discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y’all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23142216

Stuart Thompson has monitored right-wing media since 2020. He watched 47 hours of video on Rumble for this article.

As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: “We are the media now.”

The idea seemed to capture a growing sense that traditional journalists have lost their position at the center of the media ecosystem. Polls show that trust in mainstream news media has plummeted, and that nearly half of all young people get their news from “influencers” rather than journalists.

If Rumble was the media now, I wondered what it would be like to consume an all-Rumble diet. So on Nov. 18, about two weeks after the election, I deleted my news apps, unsubscribed from all my podcasts and filtered all my newsletters to the trash. And for the next week, from early morning till late at night, I got all my news from Rumble.

...they fixated on a cast of perceived enemies to blame for America’s troubles — from Democratic politicians to TikTok personalities to Republican adversaries.

Just a few hours into the experiment, it was clear that I was falling into an alternate reality fueled almost entirely by outrage...

I received a statement from Tim Murtaugh, a representative for Rumble who was also Mr. Trump’s communications director for his 2020 campaign. He said: “The New York Times and its fellow legacy media outlets have lost their monopoly on deciding what information people can have, so of course they’re rushing to attack Rumble, a key alternative in the news marketplace.”

‘You’re going to become part of the show.’

After watching Rumble nonstop for days, I realized this very article was likely to fuel its own cycle of outrage on the platform. But I was surprised when that happened before it was even published.

I wrote to everyone mentioned in the article to ask for their perspective about Rumble and its popular shows, but few replied. Instead, people like Russell Brand, the former actor turned political commentator, took one of my emails and made an entire segment out of it. Mr. Bongino called me “public enemy No. 1” and claimed my story would focus on Rumble’s fringiest voices in a bid to get the site banned.

“Don’t ever email us,” he warned. “Don’t. Because you’re going to become part of the show.”

Mr. Pentland, the co-host of “The Roseanne Barr Podcast,” posted the email I sent him to his X account. Rumble’s chief executive reposted it, then Elon Musk reposted that to his more than 200 million followers.

P.S.: Glenn Greenwald discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y'all.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide…