I guess Arizonans weren’t as impressed with batshit crazy as we thought they might be:
Some highlights:
No mass shooter vibe about that guy. None at all. Why do you ask?
He lost, thank god. But it was fairly close. Millions voted for that freak. Think about that.
Musk is making massive blunders in his take over of Twitter. It’s great fun to point and laugh. Which I will happily do. It’s an opportunity to show him (& the rest of the world) why his definition of “free speech” is juvenile and harmful. It’s also a time to point out that when social media companies fail to act on known harmful content, there should be consequences.
Showing companies the financial consequences of their failure to act on harmful rhetoric is a powerful tool for change. It’s one of the methods that I have developed and taught multiple groups & people for the last 15 years.
Bloggers Take on Talk Radio Hosts — New York Times January 15, 2007
A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers.
The lead blogger, who uses the name Spocko, said that he and other bloggers had contacted more than 30 advertisers on KSFO-AM to inform them of comments made on the air and to ask them to pull their ads.
The activist groups and individuals that I have worked with over the years like Color of Change, Free Press, and Angelo Carusone, (now the head of Media Matters for America) have used Musk’s failure to understand the harm caused by violating Twitter’s own terms and conditions around safety to convince advertisers to leave the platform.
Musk’s Paul Pelosi tweet might cost him billions in lost revenue
Musk tried to blame the activists for advertisers leaving, but just like my advertiser alert campaign in 2006, the advertisers looked at the situation and made their own decision to stop advertising.
Musk’s response reminded me of how the management of the RW radio station KSFO responded when I alerted the advertisers of the violent rhetoric coming from their hosts. First they told the advertisers that it wasn’t true, but the advertisers heard for themselves. Then they said the hosts were joking, but I had enough examples to prove that they were serious, including audio clips of them saying, ‘I’m not joking!” Instead of the station telling the hosts to stop talking about “putting a bullseye” on Nancy Pelosi, they attacked me and had my website shut down. It was a great narrative flip where they couldn’t play the victim.
When advertisers started leaving the station, one caller suggested to a host he should “name and shame” advertisers who left, to punish them. One of the three host’s agreed with that idea!
(The same suggestion was made to Musk, look at his bone head response!)
This is stupid behavior based on impulsive emotion. Lashing out at others, instead of looking at and fixing their own behavior, is typical narcissist behavior. THEY can never be the problem. “No one can tell ME what to say on my own show!” one RW host said.
Musk’s is seeing now what his definition of ‘free speech’ includes and doesn’t include. Mocking him isn’t included. Nor is impersonating brands.
Musk is learning TOS exist for a reason. “Hey, falsely impersonating others is bad! It happened to me! Spreading disinformation is bad, it led to harm to me, my bottom line!”
We know harmful content connected with terrorism, racism, misogyny and online hate is very real. I was telling someone I recently met about my work to defund right wing media because management wouldn’t take action to stop it. I told her that the movie Hotel Rwanda had a major impact on me and when I heard violent rhetoric coming out of my local radio station I decided to act. I knew that in America people change their behavior when money is involved. I set about showing the radio stations, and then TV stations, that what they thought was an asset, was actual a liability.
In America the impact of financial harm on a company is one of the ways we can drive change. It’s good to show everyone that Musk’s failure to follow Twitter’s own TOS is causing him financial harm.
But what if threatening violence is profitable? What if, like Murdoch’s Tucker Carlson show, threatening violence doesn’t earn the network money directly, but it does earn them power?
Twitter’s TOS has restrictions on threats of violence. I’ll bet that if Elon gets threats of violence toward him he’ll remove them. If they are removed, it needs to be pointed out that threats toward others should be removed too. I would say,
“Hey, Elon, you didn’t like it when you got threats of violence. You removed them. Other people should have the the same protections. Also, this is what the people you fired in the Trust Safety division did for the platform.”
POLICY & PEOPLE make a difference. AI programs alone aren’t going to cut it.
My friends in the activist community know that “Brand Safety” matters to companies and they have the financial incentive to protect their brands. They organized and taking these actions for a reason, they know some of the same things that upset Brands, like disinformation about medicine, can also hurt people. As individuals it often feels that you have no power to make a change, so I suggest you join up with these groups that are doing great, effective activism.
Here are four of my favorites and what they have said.
Free Press Action Fund
Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press. “Racists and conspiracy theorists are testing how far they can go with spreading lies, harassment and abuse — and misinformation about the midterm election is rampant. This is not the healthy forum that the vast majority of Twitter users want, and it exposes Twitter’s advertising partners to great risk. We’re calling on Twitter to, at a minimum, retain and actually enforce existing community safeguards and content-moderation systems.
Media Matters For America
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America. “Musk has already put Twitter on that glide path, firing employees responsible for content moderation and brand protection and even tweeting out political conspiracy theories himself. Luckily, major brands that advertise on Twitter, and provide over 90 percent of its revenue each year, can speak up and make it clear: Their buys are contingent on the maintenance of the key brand-safety guidelines and community standards — and they will accept nothing less.”
Color of Change: Tell Advertisers: Keep Twitter Safe
Here is a copy of the open letter they sent to the top Twitter advertisers.
My new favorite group is The Center for Countering Digital Hate
“Elon Musk has consistently failed to comprehend that freedom of speech does not mean freedom to abuse and that online spaces should be safe for women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. ”Twitter must make a clear commitment to retaining existing standards, and Musk should provide a credible plan for applying his undeniable engineering prowess to reducing the prevalence of bots, increasing the detection and pre-publication removal of violative content, and enforcing the rules that prevent his platform from becoming a ‘hellscape’ with what appears to be significantly reduced staff and resources.”
I suggest people read their STAR Framework, a Global Standard for Regulating Social Media.
Safety by Design, Transparency, Accountability and Responsibility.
Here’s a quote from it,
We cannot continue on the current trajectory with bad actors creating a muddy and dangerous information ecosystem and a broken business model from Big Tech that drives offline harm. We need to reset our relationship with technology companies and collectively legislate to address the systems that amplify hate and dangerous misinformation around the globe.
Greg Sargent offers advice for Democrats in the lame duck session. The time to prevent Republican-MAGA-insurrectionist chaos in the House is now. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein calls this a “crazyproofing agenda.” (Who might he mean by that?)
Sargent offers details. But it’s Saturday and Tropical Depression Nicole has blown through, so here are just the bullet points:
There are any number of crazy proposals a majority GOP House might advance in January. The time to “head ’em off at the pass,” so to speak, is now.
“The lame-duck Congress should do everything they can to lock in funding” for the last two bullets, advises Norm Ornstein. The first two are no-brainers, says Sargent.
Not that he meant anything by it.
NBC exit polling (above) shows that voters under 45 (and particularly under 30) turned out heavily for Democrats on Tuesday. Another early estimate showed midterm turnout among voters 18-29, even if below that of 2018, was the second highest in three decades (NPR):
About 27% of voters between the ages of 18-29 cast a ballot in the midterm election this year, according to an early estimate from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, also known as CIRCLE.
Researchers say the 2022 election had the second highest voter turnout among voters under 30 in at least the past three decades. So far, the highest turnout during a midterm for this voting bloc is 2018 when about 31% of young people who are eligible to vote cast a ballot.
During a briefing Thursday, Abby Kiesa — deputy director at CIRCLE — said 2018 remains “a high-water mark” for youth voter turnout during midterms in the U.S. since at least since the 1970s. Historically, youth voter turnout has hovered around 20% during midterm elections.
Youth turnout in North Carolina may not have reached as high as hoped, reports ABC Raleigh. Cheri Beasley surely felt it:
In North Carolina — 53% of newly registered voters were under 35 — more than double the last election. But while younger voters historically skew toward Democrats, they did not turnout in North Carolina in as high a number as other parts of the country.
That said, let us celebrate their engagement. Be sure younger voters know that their votes mattered in holding the line against an antidemocratic cult intent on collapsing constitutional order.
NPR again:
Young voters also had a significant influence on election outcomes in some of the key races in those battleground states.
According to CIRCLE, young people preferred Democratic candidates by a 28-point margin, which helped Democrats in statewide races that include the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race and the Wisconsin gubernatorial race.
“Young people stood along in supporting, decisively, a Democratic statewide race candidate,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the group’s director. “The result is that [young people] kept the races really close and in some cases we think they will decide the outcome of the race.”
Why support Democrats? Republicans have nothing to offer younger people, Victor Shi, co-host of the iGen Politics Podcast, told MSNBC this week. Republicans vote against climate change, gun reforms, abortion care, and other issues that matter to younger voters. The Dobbs decision made politics real, brought it home. They felt it viscerally.
You can be at the table or on the menu, as the saying goes. This election, younger voters chose to be at the table.
Not that voters under 45 cannot occupy more chairs (to drag out the metaphor). Thirty-four percent of Tuesday’s turnout was game-changing. But that only demonstrates how much more political weight beleaguered Millennials and Gen Z might throw around and what they might accomplish by doing so. Democrats need to pull out more chairs for them.
This graphic you’ve seen multiple times (above) does not represent North Carolina alone. Your states’ curves look similar. In the 2022 midterms, voters under 45 represented 34 percent of the vote. But by voting-age population, they represent more like 50 percent of potential voting strength.
How does it feel to save the country? Pretty damned good? Think of how it might feel to make it yours every day.
Update:
Meerkats!
We’re celebrating more new arrivals at Woburn Safari Park in the UK, as the slender-tailed meerkat mob welcomed another two babies just last month!
The new pups are the latest of three litters born to proud parents Pansy and Brendan in 2022, with keepers believing this to be the first time that we’ve ever seen this many litters from one breeding pair in a year!
The meerkat gestation period is around 10 weeks, and once born the nonbreeders in the mob will join parents in taking turns to babysit the young – this is a practice called cooperative breeding. The pups are born with their eyes and ears shut and weigh between 25-36 grams, so this method helps protect the babies when they are at their most vulnerable.
The new pups, born in August, have already made a big impression on visitors to the Park and joined older siblings Albus, Ariana, Aberforth and Argus (born in February) and Bellatrix and Barty (born in May) in enjoying their Desert Springs enclosure!
At just six weeks old these little ones are too young to sex, but in the coming weeks they will start to grow in confidence and gain more independence. At around nine weeks old they will become fully weaned and start enjoying the usual meerkat diet which includes locusts, crickets and meal worms.
You can learn more about the four meerkat pups and the rest of the mob at the various Desert Springs keeper demonstrations and feedings held throughout the day in the Foot Safari. You can view the complete timetable here.
COVID is still out there and there are undoubtedly many viruses lurking out there just waiting for their chance. So it’s good to know what works and what doesn’t.
Public schools that continued to require students to wear masks reported fewer coronavirus infections, my colleague Donna St. George reports. The study was based on schools in the Boston area and found ending mask requirements was “associated with an additional 45 coronavirus cases per 1,000 students and staff members,” St. George writes.
The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds to well-documented evidence supporting mask-wearing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people ages 2 and older wear masks indoors and in public spaces when they are in settings where infection rates are high.
Reinfections with the coronavirus can still prove dangerous in unvaccinated, vaccinated and boosted people, Ariana Eunjung Cha of The Washington Post reports.
Researchers analyzed the medical records of 5.8 million patients at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They found that nearly 41,000 people with reinfections “tended to have more complications in various organ systems both during their initial illness and longer term, and they were more likely to be diagnosed with long covid than people who did not get another infection,” Cha writes.
A growing body of research shows an increased risk of covid-related complications with every reinfection. Health experts worry that repeat infections can worsen long covid symptoms.
Other important news
Infants younger than 6 months, who are not eligible for the coronavirus vaccine, have high covid-related hospitalization rates compared with other children.
Covid patients treated with the antiviral Paxlovid were less likely to suffer from long covid symptoms, my colleague Frances Stead Sellers reports.
It is still worth using common sense strategies to avoid COVID. And at the very least it’s worth testing if you feel like you’re coming down with something so that you can get Paxlovid to lessen the symptoms and your vulnerability to long covid. And needless to say, everyone should be vaccinated and boosted. To be honest, I’m just stunned that anyone wouldn’t take that simple measure to protect themselves and others. It’s bizarre to me.
We’ve been spending most of our time looking at election polls and returns for the last couple of weeks. But now that it’s over, and the DOJ is no longer silenced, NBC gives a little update:
In February, a week before the National Archives warned the Justice Department that former President Donald Trump had kept Top Secret documents at his Florida compound, Asia Janay Lavarello was sentenced to three months in prison. She had pleaded guilty to taking classified records home from her job as an executive assistant at the U.S. military’s command in Hawaii.
“Government employees authorized to access classified information should face imprisonment if they misuse that authority in violation of criminal law,” said Hawaii U.S. Attorney Claire Connors, who did not accuse Lavarello of showing anyone the documents. “Such breaches of national security are serious violations … and we will pursue them.”
Cases like Lavarello’s are a major part of the calculus for Justice Department officials as they decide whether to move forward with charges against the former president over the classified documents found in his Florida home, current and former Justice Department officials tell NBC News. In another example, a prosecutor advising the Mar-a-Lago team, David Raskin, just last week negotiated a felony guilty plea from an FBI analyst in Kansas City, who admitted talking home 386 classified documents over 12 years. She faces up to 10 years in prison.
So what is the DOJ going to do? I really don’t know. The message they will send if they don’t treat Trump the same way they treat everyone else would say that he is above the law. And since it’s clear he IS above the law, I can’t say that I am very optimistic. I think this is probably the view of many although it’s possible that this dud of an election result may give them some gumption.
It does look to some observers that they are going for it:
The addition of Raskin, an experienced former terrorism prosecutor, and David Rody, another veteran prosecutor who left a law firm partnership to join the investigation, is widely seen as an effort to beef up the prosecution team in the event the case goes to trial.
“The National Security Division doesn’t try a lot of cases like this — they would want to bring in trial lawyers,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney and an NBC News contributor. “It looks to me like they are building a trial team.”
And then there’s the prospect of calling in a Special prosecutor, presumably to remove the taint of politics which is stupid because this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. He trashed his own DOJ for naming a Special Prosecutor and fired his Attorney General over it. Does anyone think he and his flock will feel any differently about a Special prosecutor than a regular prosecutor?
Not everyone believes that a prosecution of Trump is warranted, based on the known facts. One former U.S. attorney, a Trump critic, said a mere documents mishandling case is not serious enough to merit charging a former president, unless prosecutors can prove aggravating factors such as intent to share the material, or obstruction of justice.
“I think it’s a relatively minor case, and I don’t think you bring a minor case against a former president,” that person said.
I don’t know what they have in terms of who he may have shared this stuff with or why, but it’s clear that he committed obstruction of justice.
I remain wary of making any predictions on this. He’s been teflon his entire life.
The strategy of helping to boost GOP extremists in swing districts and states paid off:
The political support ranged from money to TV ads and email blasts. What made it unusual is where it came from, and what it was meant to do: Back in the primary season, a number of Democrats tried to boost far-right Republican candidates whom they deemed easier to beat in November.
The strategy seems to have paid off: In high-profile races where Democratic candidates or groups successfully used the strategy during the primaries, all of the Republicans they helped have either lost or are trailing, two days after Election Day.
The tactic drew headlines and warnings that the Democrats were playing with fire — especially after polls showed some of the targeted races tightening this fall. After all, the Democrats were spending resources on their rivals’ behalf, including several Trump loyalists. And they did so at the expense of moderates, writing off hopes of a less strident discourse.
Of course, not all of the far-right candidates supported by Democratic groups won their primary races — in fact, far from it. In September, an analysis by The Washington Post found that seven of 13 Democrat-backed Republican candidates lost their primaries after having more than a combined $12 million spent on their behalf.
Every one of the right wing Trumpers the Dems helped the GOP nominate (usually by painting them as the extremists they are by the way, thus making the MAGAs love them more) lost.
A lot of people I respect thought this tactic was very stupid if not downright immoral but I was never among them. It seemed to me that while it was risky, in this environment swing district GOP “moderates” were so little different in terms of the big picture that having them in congress wouldn’t offer any benefit to Democrats and very likely might cost them seats. The people running campaigns in swing districts know what their constituents are willing to bear and they knew their voters were not going to go for these extremists. As I said, it was risky, but in my opinion worth the risk. A few more Taylor Greens wouldn’t have made much difference and there was a very real upside. It paid off.
This NY Times election analysis suggests that the Democrats did so unexpectedly well is because in the states where democracy and abortion rights are at risk from the GOP extremists, the voters said no. I don’t know if that’s true (and the idea that the voters of Florida really believe DeSantis and his wingnut legislature won’t do their worst is just sad) but if it is, it is a huge validation of those who put those two issues at the top of the agenda and pounded on them for months against the advice of pearl clutchers who insisted that the only thing that mattered was gas prices.
The most obvious differences appeared to be the abortion and democracy issues that were at stake, state by state. In Pennsylvania, Republicans nominated a candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who was central to efforts to overturn the states’s 2020 presidential election results. Democrats feared that a Mastriano victory could risk a constitutional crisis and a threat to democratic government. It might have threatened another long-held right as well; Mr. Mastriano is a strident opponent of abortion, and Republicans controlled the state Legislature.
The two issues were less critical in New York. There was no danger that the Democratic Legislature would overturn abortion rights. No movement emerged in 2020 to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in New York, and there is little indication that anyone feared Mr. Zeldin might do so. As a result, Republicans focused the campaign on crime. And it paid off.
New York and Pennsylvania were part of a pattern that played out across the country.
There are exceptions, of course — like Democratic strength in Colorado or Republican durability in Texas. But most of each party’s most impressive showings fit well.
There’s the Republican landslide in Florida, where the stop-the-steal movement never sought to overturn an election result and where Gov. Ron DeSantis refused to go further than a 15-week abortion ban. There are the Democratic successes in Kansas and Michigan, where abortion referendums were on the ballot at different points this year, and where Democrats swept the most competitive House districts.
The pattern also helps explain some outliers in particular states. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur trounced her Republican opponent, J.R. Majewski, who had rallied at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and misrepresented his military service. She won by 13 points in a district that Mr. Trump won in 2020. Almost every other Republican in House races in Ohio performed better than Mr. Trump had.
The unusually uneven results nationwide also go some way toward explaining why analysts missed the signs that a “red wave” wouldn’t materialize.
The national polls, which showed Republicans ahead in the race for Congress, actually turned out to be fairly accurate. Republicans lead the House popular vote by a substantial margin, and they seem likely to win the most votes when all of the ballots are counted.
Against that backdrop, many of the poll results showing surprising Democratic strength seemed like outlying results, especially given the nationalization of American politics and how often the polls have erred in recent years. In reality, Republican strength nationwide just wasn’t translating in specific races where democracy and abortion were at stake. This dynamic was suggested by the final Times/Siena Senate polls, which showed voters preferred Republican control of the Senate but still backed individual Democratic candidates.
I love this conclusion though:
There’s no way to know what might have happened in this election if the Supreme Court hadn’t overturned abortion rights or if Mr. Trump had quickly conceded the last election. But one example that might offer a clue is Virginia. It held its governor’s and state legislative elections last year. As a result, the unusual state-by-state dynamics were absent; Virginia acted something like a control group in a nationwide experiment.
Republicans there tended to fare well Tuesday. They outperformed Mr. Trump in every House race, with Democrats winning the statewide House vote by only two percentage points — eight points worse than Mr. Biden’s 10-point victory in the state in 2020. If abortion and democracy hadn’t been major issues elsewhere, perhaps Virginia’s seemingly typical show of out-of-party strength would have been the result nationwide. But not this year.
I guess the lesson here is that the Republican erred in nominating Supreme Court justices who are determined to carry out the agenda they’ve been running for decades and they probably shouldn’t try to overthrow democracy? Good advice. But really, it’s not going to be very different in the next election when it really is a national race. They built their party around the anti-abortion movement for decades and refused to impeach Trump after January 6th which would have prevented him from running again. They made this bed.
I keep coming back to this comment by former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens because I think he understands something that the data driven, focus group obsessives don’t want to see:
Last night, four members of the right wing majority attended a gala to celebrate the immiseration of American women.
Four of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to abortion showed up at the conservative Federalist Society’s black-tie dinner marking its 40th anniversary.
Justice Samuel Alito got a long, loud ovation Thursday night from a crowd of 2,000 people, most in tuxedos and gowns, when another speaker praised his opinion in June that overturned Roe v. Wade, long a target of judicial conservatives.
At a moment when opinion surveys show that Americans think the court is becoming more political and give it dismal approval ratings, the justices turned out to celebrate the group that helped then-President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans move the American judiciary, including the Supreme Court, to the right.
The Federalist Society has no partisan affiliation and takes no position in election campaigns, but it is closely aligned with Republican priorities, including the drive to overturn Roe.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Alito offered brief remarks that steered well clear of the court’s work, though Alito praised the Federalist Society for its success in the Trump years and hoped it would continue. “Boy, is your work needed today,” he said.
Barrett’s only allusion to the abortion case came when she responded to the crowd’s roar of approval when she was introduced. “It’s really nice to have a lot of noise made not by protesters outside my house,” she said.
Amid heavy security, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh also were in attendance in the main hall at Washington’s Union Station, where the silhouette of James Madison, the group’s logo, was projected on the walls.
I’m sure these people with lifetime appointments enjoyed the feeling of love and warmth in the arms of the people who love them best: authoritarians.
