Today is the day that Elon Musk said he would remove the blue checkmarks from “legacy” verified accounts on Twitter unless the users paid $8 per month. For businesses and government entities, the cost is much higher. The blue checks identify notable people who provide most of the engagement on the social media site. But so far today, the blue checks are still in place. Over the past few days, news organizations and the White House have said they will not pay, and a number of celebrities have also declined to pay. It doesn’t look like Musk will get much income from this stupid policy.
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times,the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, POLITICO, and Vox all scoffed at the notion on Thursday that they would pay Twitter for the feature, which has been free since it was introduced years ago but will soon be phased out.
CNN said it has no intention of paying for Twitter’s subscription service for its accounts but would make a few exceptions for some key staff.
“As of right now, we do not plan to pay for Twitter Blue subscriptions for either our brand or individual accounts, except for a small number of select teams who need this verification as an essential part of newsgathering and reporting,” said Athan Stephanopoulos, CNN’s chief digital officer, in a staff memo Friday.
Twitter announced last week that it will begin “removing legacy verified checkmarks” starting April 1. Musk has aimed to charge organizations that want to retain a checkmark adjacent to their account name $1,000 a month, plus an additional $50 a month for each affiliated account.
Historically, a blue checkmark placed next to the name of an account has indicated that the social media company has confirmed the identity of the person or business operating it. The feature has been helpful to Twitter’s entire community, giving the public an easy way of distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic users.
But Musk, who has sought to change Twitter’s business model and make it less reliant on advertisers — many of which have fled the company since he took over last year — wants to charge for the coveted check.
Musk earlier this year launched Twitter Blue, a subscription service that costs $8 a month. The main benefit? A blue checkmark.
The White House will not pay to have its staff’s official Twitter profiles continue to be verified, according to guidance issued to staffers via an email obtained by Axios….
Official White House staffers rely on their verified accounts to inform the public on behalf of the administration. Verification, combined with the designated Twitter profiles, helped to ensure the public could trust those messages….
“It is our understanding that Twitter Blue does not provide person-level verification as a service. Thus, a blue check mark will now simply serve as a verification that the account is a paid user,” White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty told staffers in an email sent Friday afternoon.
The guidance, which was sent internally to White House staffers, doesn’t necessarily apply to government agencies, but a source familiar with White House plans said it may send guidance to some agencies and departments in the future.
This thread by a former Twitter employee provides a great deal of information about the past policies on Twitter verification and why making people who provide most of the content on the site pay for the privilege is really stupid.
1) As someone who was (briefly) in charge of the Twitter Media team – the group tasked with getting high profile people onto Twitter, and verification – AND as one of the few ever to voluntarily give up the blue check, I want to try to articulate how risky this policy change is. https://t.co/ABYu2kJIWa
3) We verified those people so that any user could know they were interacting with a real account; part of the fun of twitter is the real time dialogue with thought leaders (that then flows to others in the replies who get to share their thoughts and ideas).
Beginning April 1, Twitter will start removing “legacy verified checkmarks” from the profiles of celebrities, journalists, civil servants and other public figures. Twitter is making the move in an attempt to force more users to pay for “verified” check marks, as part of its agenda to monetize a service that was previously handled by the company for free.
But so far, the plan isn’t going well. As CNN reports, many media organizations, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, POLITICO and Vox, are already saying they have no plans to dish out money for Twitter Blue, the fee-based service that includes those blue check marks. The White House will also not be paying staffers for verified accounts, according to Axios. And Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James promises that he “ain’t paying.”
This was an entirely predictable case of Twitter CEO Elon Musk playing himself. Why would media outlets — or anyone else — rush to pay for verified badges when he’s systematically destroyed their meaning? [….]
Williard, by Emma Hesse
Musk believed he could turn verified badges into a key source of new revenue for making Twitter profitable, a goal that’s surely growing more difficult as advertisers have fled Twitter en masse after Musk took over the company last year. But now key demographics that he would’ve hoped to have secured for paying for the service — journalists, famous celebrities, and government workers — might be checking out altogether. And that’s because Musk unraveled the purpose of the very thing he wanted to make money off.
As I’ve explained before, Musk fundamentally misunderstood or disregarded the true value of verified badges to most people who had them. Their original purpose was for Twitter to confirm that public figures were who they actually said they were in order to combat impersonation and misinformation. It was the key feature of what made Twitter a reliable source of news: verified accounts helped separate trustworthy statements and reporting from rumors and false claims.
But Musk decided that the reason verified badges were important was not because they verified identity, but because of the way they signaled social clout — and that he could cash in on this by trying to get a bigger network of people to pay for them. So now under his paid verification service, users’ identities are not confirmed, but blue checks can be distributed to anyone willing to open up their wallet. In other words, he’s hollowed out their meaning but kept the trappings intact.
Yesterday, an interesting court case involving Twitter was decided. The case demonstrates how Twitter has been used to promote disinformation.
Douglass Mackey, a supporter of former president Donald Trump who used Twitter to disseminate false information to redirect would-be voters of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, was convicted Friday on a charge of conspiracy against rights, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn announced.
A federal jury issued the verdict after a week-long trial in New York. Mackey, 33, faces 10 years in prison.
“Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
By Belinda Del Pesco
In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, prosecutors said Mackey used a Twitter alias with about 58,000 followers — @Ricky_Vaughn99, reportedly derived from actor Charlie Sheen’s character Ricky Vaughn in the 1989 film “Major League” — to circulate messages on Twitter that encouraged Clinton’s supporters to “vote” via text message or social media, methods that were not valid.
“For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting ‘black turnout,’ the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an ‘African Americans for Hillary’ sign,” the U.S. attorney’s office said.
The deceptive ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” It also included fine print at the bottom that mimicked a real ad, stating: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”
Prosecutors said Mackey also used his Ricky Vaughn persona to tweet a similar deceptive ad in Spanish, which included a copy of Clinton’s campaign logo and her campaign’s oft-used “ImWithHer” hashtag.
Leading up to Election Day, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or something similar to the 59925 text number, the U.S. attorney’s office said. At the time, Mackey’s fake Twitter profile was rated the 107th most influential with respect to that year’s election, according to an analysis done by the MIT Media Lab, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Read more at the WaPo.
We are all waiting with bated breath to find out what will happen on Tuesday when Trump is expected to voluntarily surrender and face charges recommended by the grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Trump has been using his social media platform Truth Social to threaten both the DA and the Judge in the case. I hope the judge will issue a gag order to shut him up. So far Trump’s followers haven’t shown signs of organizing as they did for January 6, but New York is preparing for possible violence. Here’s the latest:
One year ago this week, the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump appeared to be dead in the water.
The two leaders of the investigation had recently resigned after the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to charge Mr. Trump at that point. Amid a fierce backlash to his decision — and a brutal start to his tenure — Mr. Bragg insisted that the investigation was not over. But a disbelieving media questioned why, if the effort was still moving forward, there were few signs of it.
“Unless y’all are great poker players,” Mr. Bragg told The New York Times in an early April 2022 interview, “you don’t know what we’re doing.”
What they were doing, new interviews show, was going back to square one, poring over the reams of evidence that had already been collected by his predecessor.
For a time, their efforts were haphazard as they examined a wide range of Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had lied about his net worth, which was the focus of the investigation when Mr. Bragg had declined to seek an indictment. But by July, Mr. Bragg had decided to assign several additional prosecutors to pursue one particular strand that struck him as promising: a hush-money payment made on Mr. Trump’s behalf to a porn star during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump was indicted on that strand. He is expected to surrender to the authorities in Manhattan on Tuesday and face arraignment on more than two dozen charges, which will be unveiled at that time.
Read how it happened at the NYT link. It’s a long, interesting read.
Former President Donald Trump is facing multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony offense, in the indictment handed down by a Manhattan grand jury, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday.
He will be formally arrested and arraigned Tuesday in his hush money case, setting the scene for the historic, shocking moment when a former president is forced to stand before a judge to hear the criminal charges against him.
The indictment remained sealed and the specific charges were not immediately known, but details were confirmed by people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that isn’t yet public….
When Trump turns himself in, he’ll be booked mostly like anyone else facing charges, mug shot, fingerprinting and all. But he isn’t expected to be put in handcuffs; he’ll have Secret Service protection and will almost certainly be released that same day….
In the meantime, Trump’s legal team prepared his defense while the prosecutor’s office defended the grand jury investigation that propelled the matter toward trial. Congressional Republicans, as well as Trump himself, contend the whole matter is politically motivated.
“We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference,” Leslie Dubeck, general counsel in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, wrote in a letter sent Friday to three Republican House committee chairs that was obtained by The Associated Press.
New York City is making plans for security and to deal with any possible violence next week.
Since Trump’s March 18 post claiming his arrest was imminent, authorities have ratcheted up security, deploying additional police officers, lining the streets around the courthouse with barricades and dispatching bomb-sniffing dogs. They’ve had to respond to bomb and death threats, a suspicious powder scare and a pro-Trump protester who was arrested Tuesday after witnesses say she pulled a knife on passersby.
Since no former president had ever been charged with a crime, there’s no rulebook for booking the defendant. He will be fingerprinted and have a mug shot taken, and investigators will complete arrest paperwork and check to see if he has any outstanding criminal charges or warrants, according to a person familiar who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive security operations.
Included in a litany of profane, typo-laden emails sent to Bragg on the heels of Trump’s Thursday indictment were overtly racist and anti-Semitic insults and threats on the DA’s life.
“Hay George Soros a** hole puppet If you want President Trump come and get me to,” read one email. “Remember we are everywhere and we have guns.” [….]
People apparently unhappy about Bragg’s still-sealed indictment against Trump targeted multiple email addresses associated with Bragg’s website. The correspondence was shared exclusively with the Daily News by a senior adviser to Bragg, who asked to remain anonymous.
“How do we a a [n—-r] like you removed feom office?” read another email.
On a section of Bragg’s campaign website, where people can sign up to receive updates about Bragg’s work, scores of people entered fake names using racial epithets targeting the DA. The majority included despicable language like “bl*** trash [f—-r]” and “Aids Infested…” [….]
The largely anonymous onslaught comes as Trump’s incendiary rhetoric directed at Bragg, widely condemned as both violent and racist, escalates to a fever pitch following his indictment. Bragg is Manhattan’s first Black district attorney.
Minutes after news broke of former President Donald Trump’s indictment, a comment on the pro-Trump internet forum Patriots.win, also known as TheDonald, skyrocketed to the top of the message board.
“****ACCELERATE,” the comment, written by a user named TheSpeakerfortheDead, reads in its entirety.
Below that user, others quickly piled on, saying the grand jury that indicted Trump is “guilty of treason” and that their personal information should be made public.
The word “accelerate” is a reference to the far-right term accelerationism, the idea that the state must be abolished, usually violently, and replaced with a new one.
While there is little evidence of similar planning for real-world unrest just yet, extremism researchers are keeping a close eye on the varied calls for everything from targeted attacks on the district attorney who brought the case to a new civil war.
“Accelerationism is a concept on the far right that’s defined by a cynicism and disbelief in the legitimacy of the democratic process or in functions of government,” said Jared Holt, a researcher at the extremism studies nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “Subscribers to it suggest as a solution a series of actions that are often violent, and meant to compromise or hasten what they believe to be unavoidable collapse of that system.”
Holt said the term was used earlier in the decade to describe white supremacist extremist groups like Atomwaffen, who frequently agitate for and commit acts of violence. Some users on pro-Trump forums have begun to embrace the nomenclature as more and more radical and violent rhetoric has seeded into their space.
“The hope is that by advocating for the destruction of those systems or for the destabilizing of society — whether it’s through mass violence or purposeful misinformation — by playing a role in the collapse that they would also cement a position for themselves when they’re rebuilding it in their own image,” Holt he said.
Former President Donald Trump can’t seem to stop talking about his indictment. But once he’s arraigned, it’s “extremely likely” that he’ll have to, a former senior staffer with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office told Insider.
His freedom to rant on Truth Social and say what he wants about his case at rallies will likely change once he surrenders and appears in a Manhattan courthouse, according to Duncan Levin, who is also a former federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice.
Manhattan’s Acting Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is expected to arraign Trump on Tuesday, is likely to put conditions on his release, and that’s “most likely” when the judge will issue a gag order, restricting Trump from discussing the case, Levin said. If Trump violates it by speaking about the litigation outside the courtroom, he could face consequences.
Punishment for criminal contempt, under New York law, is a fine not exceeding $1,000, jail for up to 30 days or both.
“I think it’s not only a possibility, but it’s extremely likely that there will be a gag order in the case,” said Levin, known for representing clients including Harvey Weinstein and Anna Sorokin. “Gag orders are very common in criminal cases, particularly in cases where there is an enormous amount of pretrial publicity like this one.”
Irina Kalentieva – Gustave Francois Lasellaz French 1848-1910
A bit more:
If there’s a gag order, Levin said Trump will be “very limited” in what he’s able to say, even if there may be proxies who speak for him. The court has the ability to set the rules for his conduct while he’s most likely to be out on bail, pending proceedings.
“This is a criminal case now, so the rules have changed, and the rules are no longer in his purview to make,” Levin said. “He is a criminal defendant and, you know, we see hundreds of thousands of criminal defendants across the country every day who have a lot of rights stripped away from them and he is now one of them. These proceedings are going to change his life.”
Former Indiana Attorney General Jeff Modisett said he also expected that a judge could narrowly craft a gag order that could survive an appeal. He added that Trump’s status as a presidential candidate certainly complicates the First Amendment questions that are always present when such an order is considered.
“I could see where in a case like this based upon statements like that a judge could … issue a gag order,” Modisett said after an Insider reporter read to him the former president’s attack on Merchan. “Given Donald Trump’s history in litigation there is likely to be an appeal, but a carefully defined, narrowly restricted gag order would be upheld by the courts on appeal.”
So that’s what’s happening today as I see it. What do you think? What other stories are you following?
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A mystery investor or hedge fund reportedly made a bet of almost $1billion at odds of 10/1 last month that the U.S. would lose its AAA credit rating.
Now questions are being asked of whether the trader had inside information before placing the $850million bet in the futures market.
The Daily Mail suggests this might involve George Soros, but a knowledgeable source denied it. The article also suggests that whoever made the bet could have had inside information–arguing that Obama and Geithner seem to have known for some time that a downgrade by S&P was in the works. Of course The Daily Mail is a conservative rag.
The latest bet was made on July 21 on trades of 5,370 ten-year Treasury futures and 3,100 Treasury bond futures, reported ETF Daily News.
Now the investor’s gamble seems to have paid off after Standard and Poor’s issued a credit rating downgrade from AAA to AA+ last Friday.
Whoever it is stands to earn a 1,000 per cent return on their money, with the expectation that interest rates will be going up after the downgrade.
Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, had between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT. The fund aggressively “shorts” long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, meaning that it performs well when U.S. debt is undesirable. (A short is when the trader hopes to profit from the decline in the value of an asset.)
According to his latest financial disclosure statement, which covers the year 2010 and has been publicly available since this spring, Cantor still has up to $15,000 in the same fund. Contacted by Salon this week, Cantor’s office gave no indication that the Virginia Republican, who has played a leading role in the debt ceiling negotiations, has divested himself of these holdings since his last filing.
Why are these kinds of investments bets even legal? This is nothing but high stakes gambling, and it’s just plain wrong.
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Good Morning!! Isn’t it fun to look out your window and see a coating of ice all over everything? Especially when you already have mountains of snow out there. I plan to spend much of the day throwing ice pellets around and trying to chip the pile of ice that a snowplow left at the end of my driveway. Oh joy!
So what’s in the news this morning? Let me see….. I thought I’d post some video of Noam Chomsky discussing the Egyptian protests on Democracy Now.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained Tuesday that the embattled Egyptian president was “immensely courageous and a force for good.”
Appearing on CNN, Blair praised Mubarak’s role in brokering peace between Israel and Palestine. The former prime minister is now an envoy to the peace process….
…where you stand on him depends on whether you’ve worked with him from the outside or on the inside,” Blair replied. “And for those of us who worked with him over the — particularly now I worked with him on the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians, so this is somebody I’m constantly in contact with and working with.”
President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America’s leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood’s cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States – Syria and Iran – than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.
The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.
I am, as a general rule, wary of revolutions. But in the case of Egypt, I see a good chance of success. As a committed advocate of democracy and open society, I cannot help but share in the enthusiasm that is sweeping across the Middle East. I hope President Obama will expeditiously support the people of Egypt.
A close look at how Egypt’s seemingly stable surface cracked in so short a time shows how Egypt’s rulers and their Western allies were caught almost completely off guard as the revolution unfolded, despite deep concerns about where Egypt’s authoritarian government was leading the country.
From the moment demonstrators began pouring into the street, those leaders have been scrambling to keep up, often responding in ways that have accelerated the crisis.
[….]
…last week, tens of thousands of Egyptians began taking to the streets, flooding into the central Tahrir Square after pitched battles with thousands of riot police. It became the largest popular protest in Egypt since the so-called Bread Riots against rising prices in 1977.
Mr. Mubarak’s regime was stunned. “No one expected those numbers that showed up to Tahrir square,” said Ali Shamseddin, a senior official with the National Democratic Party in Cairo.
In faraway Washington, the demonstrations were only starting to register. Last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, delivered the day the protests started, had only a short section on foreign policy. President Barack Obama planned to nod to the democratic movement that swept away the ruler of Tunisia, a place “where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator,” the speech read.
After that, it’s kind of embarrassing that Obama is clearly more concerned about “stability” (oil?) in Egypt than the “will of the people.”
As the winds dropped on the coast and locals emerged from cyclone bunkers and evacuation centres, they found widespread damage, especially in the coastal communities of Tully, Mission Beach and Cardwell.
Driving winds of 180mph had uprooted trees and torn roofs and walls from homes and businesses.
During the morning, dangerous storm surges were causing flooding in low-lying urban areas in the cities of Cairns and Townsville and the authorities urged residents to stay indoors.
[….]
In total, 170,000 properties were without power and thousands of people were likely to be left homeless after their homes were severely damaged by the worst cylone to hit Australia since 1918. Storm surges and flooding were also rolling into low-lying areas and inundating homes throughout the morning. Compounding the crisis, saltwater crocodiles had been spotted in floodwater.
Yikes! At least my power didn’t go out, and there aren’t any crocodiles out there.
That’s all I’ve got. What are you reading and blogging about this morning?
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You’ve probably heard about George Soros’ remarks at a meeting for big bucks progressive donors on Tuesday. Sam Stein at Huffpo:
The Hungarian-American financier was speaking to a small side gathering of donors who had convened in Washington D.C. for the annual gathering of the Democracy Alliance — a formal community of well-funded, progressive-minded individuals and activists.
According to multiple sources with knowledge of his remarks, Soros told those in attendance that he is “used to fighting losing battles but doesn’t like to lose without fighting.”
“We have just lost this election, we need to draw a line,” he said, according to several Democratic sources. “And if this president can’t do what we need, it is time to start looking somewhere else.”
Michael Vachon, an adviser to Soros, did not dispute the comment, though he stressed that there was no transcript of a private gathering to check. Vachon also clarified that the longtime progressive giver was not referring to a primary challenge to the president.
Really? Hmmmm…. So um, who leaked the news from the secret meeting?
And there’s more:
Dissatisfaction with the Obama administration was not limited to Soros’s private gathering with donors. On Wednesday morning, Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina received several tough questions during his address to the Democracy Alliance. According to a source in the room, he was pressed multiple times as to why the administration has declined to be more combative with Republicans, both in communication and legislative strategy.
So Soros and pals are all hunky-dory with Obama? I’m not sure I buy that. Anyway this is being spun as simply a discussion about giving money to outside groups instead of directly to Obama–a change from 2008 when Obama directed his donors to funnel all money through his campaign instead of giving to groups like Move on.org.
Let’s look at some of the reactions to this political bombshell.
Soros isn’t actually a liberal Democrat — he has a diverse collection of interests, some of which (drug legalization) don’t move at all when Democrats win. There may be some millionaires who want to beat Obama in a primary, but there are more who want to activate the third party pro-Democrat groups that Obama wanted to evaporate in 2008-2010.
Soros, a billionaire who has been among the most generous donors to liberal causes over the years, has recently indicated he no longer intends to fund the kind of independent political advertising campaigns he backed in 2004 and that Republican allies used to bombard Democrats in the midterm elections.
During a private session Wednesday on the sidelines of a conference of major Democratic donors organized by the Democracy Alliance, Soros reiterated the position that wealthy liberals should focus their giving on groups that will push President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats on liberal legislative initiatives, rather than groups supporting individual candidates, according to a source in the meeting.
“George was talking about how, in the context of the election, progressives are disappointed, and that they should keep (the administration) focused on certain issues that we should be promoting,” said the source, who did not want to be identified because Democracy Alliance bars attendees from discussing its conferences.
According to some loose-lipped folks that attended a private event for the Democracy Alliance in Washington today, the hedge-fund billionaire and longtime Democratic donor George Soros is very upset about the last election, not least because his plans to grow a crop of Maui Wowie in his front yard were stymied, and he hinted darkly that the president may not have his support for much longer.
I have to say I agree with Soros on the legalization issue.
In other news, unemployment benefits will soon expire for two million Americans, and since Congress won’t be in session next week (they get whole weeks off for holidays), they will have to do something soon or face the wrath of voters when they go home for Thanksgiving.
Currently five million people are receiving aid under two federally-funded programs for the long-term unemployed.
Yet no clear path forward has emerged in Congress for reauthorizing those programs. Aides have floated the idea of coupling the benefits with a reauthorization of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for the top two percent of earners.
But it won’t happen if Ben “Scrooge” Nelson gets his way.
Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat who sided with Republicans when they blocked the previous reauthorization for nearly two months this summer, said he doesn’t love the tax cut deal.
“That’s a mistake,” said Nelson, who has joined the GOP in opposing the extended benefits unless their deficit impact is offset with spending cuts. “Unless unemployment is paid for, I can’t support it.”
Why don’t you just switch parties, Ben, and take President teleprompter Jesus with you.
It was a classic skirmish of the 1960s culture war, pitting a nonconformist rock star and his bohemian fans against clean-cut defenders of acceptable behavior, the counterculture against the mainstream, and Jim Morrison against Anita Bryant.
Now the governor of Florida says he will seek to put an end to it by pursuing a posthumous pardon for two criminal convictions that Morrison, the frontman for the Doors, received after some very bad behavior at a 1969 concert in Miami.
I can get behind that. Why not give Morrison a posthumous Medal of Freedom too? And lets submit his name for the Nobel Peace Prize. Morrison gave me a lot more joy than I ever got from the latest Medal of Freedom winner or the Nobel Peace Prize winning War President.
“The more that I’ve read about the case and the more I get briefed on it,” Mr. Crist said in an interview on Tuesday, “the more convinced I am that maybe an injustice has been done here.”
For those on the other side, the passion has dimmed, but a sour taste lingers. The anger that once brought them to the barricades has dulled to an impatient pique at the notion that the fate of a dead rock star still commands attention 40 years later.
The fight began on March 1, 1969, when the Doors played a raucous concert at Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. An intoxicated Morrison stumbled through songs like “Light My Fire” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” taunted the crowd and threatened to expose himself before fans mobbed the stage. A newspaper review said the singer appeared to simulate masturbation during his performance, and the concert was investigated by a Miami crime commission as six arrest warrants were issued for Morrison, including one for a felony charge of lewd and lascivious behavior.
I’ll end with a great Morrison song with some stirring lyrics that are very relevant today.
Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I’ll get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try
The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We’re takin’ over
Come on!
Except maybe we should change that to
“the rich get richer/ and the poor get angrier.”
So what’s on your reading list today?
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Barack Obama speaking at 2007 fundraiser in New York
As Dakinikat pointed out in her latest post, Paul Krugman used his column today to describe (and bemoan) Barack Obama’s negotiating style and his apparent lack of ideology. Krugman argues that the problem we face now (emphasis added) is:
…the contrast between the administration’s current whipped-dog demeanor and Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric as a candidate. How did we get from “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” to here?
But the bitter irony goes deeper than that: the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.
In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions….the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?
So far the answer has been no.
Although Krugman has come a long way from the days when he defended Obama’s health care “reform” bill, he is still clinging to the notion that Obama is a well-meaning, although hopelessly weak and gullible liberal. But what if Obama never intended to keep his campaign promises? What if he always planned to help cover up the Bush administration’s crimes and continue their wars?
In a recent post, I linked to this article at Common Dreams: Obama Was Used, And Is Now Used Up, by Robert Freeman. Freeman writes:
Barack Obama was used. Of course, he knew he was being used when he made the deal. But what he didn’t know was how quickly he would be used up. Now he has to face two years of humiliation knowing that he betrayed the people and the country he claimed to champion – and knowing that everyone else knows it as well – but also knowing that he’s gotten what’s coming to him.
Obama made a deal to get the job in the first place. The deal was that he would carry on with Bush’s bailout of the banks, with Bush’s two wars, with Bush’s suppression of civil liberties, that he wouldn’t prosecute or even investigate any of the enormous fraud that had brought down the country, or the lies that had railroaded it into war.
he teaches history and economics at Los Altos High School in Los Altos, CA. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American students build schools in the developing world through contributions of one dollar.
He has been contributing to Common Dreams since at least 2004. Freeman doesn’t say with whom Obama supposedly made a deal, or why that entity would want the U.S. to continue the Bush administration’s policies. For all I know, Freeman could be just talking through his hat when he makes this unsourced claim; but isn’t it something many of us have wondered about for the past several years? I know I have.
Still, Why would Obama do that? Why would he campaign on high-minded generalities, leading gullible “progressives” and even well-meaning liberals to believe he would transform Washington DC and reverse Bush policies like torture, indefinite detention, and concentration of power in the executive branch?
Why did the financial community back him so strongly? Wasn’t it most likely their desire to get their hands on the Social Security trust fund? Perhaps they made a deal with Obama to engineer an assault on Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs, but would the financial community also demand that Obama continue the Bush policies of torture, detention, and endless war?
Now let’s look at the latest article by Bruce Dixon at The Black Agenda Report: Barack Obama, Social Security and the Final Irrelevance of the Black Misleadership Class. Dixon also claims that Obama’s betrayal of all that is liberal was foreordained because of a deal to make him President.
The masters of corporate media proclaim that their raid on social security, is a done deal. “Entitlements,” their code word for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, will be cut in the lame duck session of Congress, with Democratic president Barack Obama taking the lead. Though the outlines of this raid have been clear for months, what passes for black America’s political leadership class have been silent. As far as we know, they have not been ordered to shut up. They have silenced themselves, in abject deference to the corporate black Democrat in the White House.
It took a Republican Richard Nixon to open relations with China in the seventies. It took Democrat Bill Clinton to impose draconian cuts in welfare and end college courses for prisoners in the nineties. And today, only a black Democratic president can sufficiently disarm Democrats, only a black Democrat can demobilize the black polity completely enough for the raid on “entitlements” to be successful.
Dixon then points out a fact that many white “progressives” are missing:
Many among the current Congressional Black Caucus are utterly unprepared to stand against the corporate onslaught to gut social security because it is backed by the same forces who have made their political careers possible, and spearheaded by a black Democrat in the White House. The NAACP and similar advocacy organizations too have neutered themselves with a generation of corporate financing and the “reward” of regular meetings with White House officials
Some “progressives” are discussing as possibilities for a primary challenger to Obama in 2012 or, alternatively, a third party challenger. Both of these efforts will fail, because any challenger to Obama will not win the black vote. Dixon implies that Obama’s “deal with the devil” was a sellout to corporate interests.
Inflicting a fatal wound on social security has been the aim of America’s business class for generations. It is a project upon which some of them have spent billions. Thanks to our lack of a functioning black press, or electronic media that address black audiences, most African Americans don’t know who billionaire Pete Peterson is.
Peterson is a billionaire who announced his intention almost 20 years ago to spend every last dime of his net worth to kill social security…. [Peterson has] push[…] the fraudulent notion that social security is “a Ponzi scheme,” unsustainable, a drain on the nation’s finances, and won’t be there when people currently in their thirties and forties get old anyhow. A decades-long campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt has been waged against the American people to prepare for the final undoing of the New Deal and Great Society programs of social security, Medicaid and Medicare. But it’s a campaign most of us are barely aware of.
Is Dixon right? Did Obama sell out in order to destroy social security? Then who demanded that Obama continue all of the Bush policies and block any close examination of Bush administration crimes?
I’m not suggesting any vast, all-encompassing conspiracy–clearly Obama’s corporate and political backers had differing goals in mind when they gave him their money. They probably didn’t all gather in a large room and deliberately plan to make Obama President. Some, like Teddy Kennedy, probably believed that Obama would really follow in JFK’s footsteps, inspiring a new generation to enter politics and change the system in radical ways. Read the rest of this entry »
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