Donald Trump is indulging his second-rate reality show roots by declaring that he will name his running mate at the Republican National Convention—an appearance that could be coming live from Rikers Island.
According to most news outlets, the list of potential vice presidential candidates holds eight names. But based on a flurry of behind-the-scenes paperwork, four are thought to be in the lead: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
When most presidential candidates go shopping for a running mate, there are a couple of qualifications at the top of the list. First, they seek out someone who bolsters them in some critical political area—more liberal, more conservative, from a swing state, etc. That political boost is often the most important factor because it doesn’t matter what wonderful ideas you might have if you can’t win the election.
Second, most presidential candidates look for someone who could step up to lead the party, keep policy moving in the right direction, and sustain their legacy when they're no longer behind the Resolute Desk. They look for someone who might not agree with them on every issue but is simpatico in the broad scope.
But these are not Trump’s concerns. He's not looking for a replacement because he never expects to be replaced. Still, he does have some very big items on his shopping list.
For Trump, a qualified vice presidential candidate has to meet three criteria:
Surrogacy: How well can they praise Trump on any occasion, defend him to the news media, deflect any real concern, and never ever seem to have a thought of their own? How easily does the term “fake news media” roll off their lips when dealing with a persistent reporter? How quick are they to grab any good news and attribute it to Trump’s brilliance? Being a walking “Donald Trump is my god” yard sign is 99.4% of the job, so this is very important. Anything that resembles a personality or charisma is a negative factor.
Subservience: How well can they imitate a wet mop, giving Trump the instant compliance he wants without ever being caught up with concerns about legality, morality, etc.? This is where Mike Pence failed. When it comes to being a Trump surrogate, it might not be possible to do better than Pence—a blank, extremely white screen onto which any Trump thought could be projected. But Pence had a critical flaw. It turned out that some portion of his pretense at morality was real. Sure, it was just a tiny thing, one that allowed Pence to look right past Trump’s demeaning of veterans, abuse of immigrants, and giggle sessions with authoritarian dictators. But when it came down to taking part in an attempt to overthrow the country, Pence, um, quailed. Pence set a pretty low bar, but every single potential Trump vice president for 2024 will be required to limbo cleanly under that bar.
Sacrifice: Finally, a Trump vice president has to be ready to jump in to take a bullet at any time, whether literal or metaphorical. When the pitchforks inevitably come out or the next angry, insurrectionist mob with a mobile gallows comes calling, how willing is the would-be veep to place their body between the pointy ends and Trump? Because, when it comes down to it, every authoritarian leader needs to have an escape plan. People who can be tossed behind them to slow down the chase are vital.
With these three critical factors in mind, here’s how Rubio, Vance, Burgum, and Scott are shaping up.
Rubio is leaning heavily on the idea that Trump needs him to add a dash of not-so-obviously-a-white-supremacist-movement to the ticket. It’s not clear that anything other than his Cuban heritage has elevated Rubio from the ranks of the perpetually derided “Little Marco.”
But at the moment, Rubio seems short on surrogacy. He’s been reluctant to completely ditch his day job and go on the road as a part of Trump’s traveling praise chorus. While other candidates seem happy to toady in ways that would embarrass actual toads (looking at you, Tim Scott), Rubio seems to believe in satisfying the more traditional qualifications of being helpful to the ticket and qualified to step in. It’s not that he doesn’t get on Fox News and praise Trump, he just hasn’t made that the core of his being.
Scott is at the far end of the spectrum. He is absolutely excelling at surrogacy. He has taken to surrogacy as if his soul had been sucked out by a rabid Roomba. There is so little left inside that he can’t answer any question if the answer doesn’t come in the form of repeating a Trump talking point.
He's even giving a preview of sacrifice by taking anything that looks like self-respect or dignity and impaling it on a giant spike. Nothing any other candidate has done has been half as iconic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaKgaUpW_RQ&t=7s
Vance has also been out there demonstrating his skills as a Trump surrogate. But Vance has a flaw: He thinks he’s smart. He has his own book to promote, and his own ideas. Some have also looked at him as a logical successor to Trump.
These are definitely negative points for Vance. Trump doesn’t want anyone whose worldview doesn’t center on Trump, and he definitely doesn’t want his cabinet eyeing someone as a an acceptable substitute. Unless Vance has some other redeeming quality (is he really bad at golf? That might help), he’s probably at the bottom of the shortlist.
Burgum is … there. Apparently, North Dakota runs on autopilot because the governor can practically live at Mar-a-Lago and join Trump on his plane more often than Jeffery Epstein.
Burgum has been serving as a regular warm-up act at Trump rallies. He’s clearly willing to spend all of his time standing next to Trump in the endless shrimp line, but his total value seems to end at his not-all-that-deep pockets and the perception that he will never, ever upstage Trump.
Honestly, that might be enough.
It’s tough to rank the final four right now, and it’s also somewhat pointless. It’s not as if Trump’s running mate will be allowed to bring any of their own ideas or hold any influence should Trump regain the White House.
And even though these four have been named as the most likely suspects, Trump continues to respond favorably to every name that’s brought up to him when a Republican says something he likes. Isn’t that right, Tom Cotton?
And Trump could always just declare that he’s choosing Omarosa. After all, they have history, chemistry, and so much in common.
If only the GOP were capable of shame or gave a shit about consistency (to say nothing of victims of gun violence)
When the Supreme Court overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, an accessory that turns semiautomatic rifles into weapons of mass destruction, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his concurrence that there was a “simple remedy” to ban the part: “Congress can act.”
The Senate is attempting to do just that, with Democrats trying to pass a bipartisan bill to ban bump stocks on Tuesday. They are trying to bring the bill to the floor under unanimous consent, a way of fast-tracking its passage. The move takes on both Republicans—who will certainly object—and the Supreme Court.
“We must act because a few days ago, the MAGA Supreme Court struck once again, saying the federal government has no power to ban the sale of bump stocks,” he said. “The MAGA Court’s decision is an utter disgrace—it will endanger our communities, endanger law enforcement, and make it easier for mass shooters to unleash carnage. Last week’s decision is another warning sign that this MAGA court is going off the deep end, aligning with the most extreme elements of the hard-right.”
The bill comes from Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Republican Sen. Susan Collins from Maine. Since the court’s Friday ruling, the bill has gained 20 new cosponsors.
The ruling was not based on the Second Amendment grounds but on tortured semantics: What did Congress mean when it effectively banned people from owning machine guns back in the 1930s? Even though a semiautomatic with a bump stock could kill 58 people and injure more than 800 in a matter of minutes just like a machine gun, the majority argued that it couldn’t be called a machine gun.
Despite the fact that this isn’t a gun ownership issue and that the bill is at least nominally bipartisan, Republicans are not likely to allow it to go forward. Even though, as Schumer points out, it was their guy who established the regulation in the first place.
“What today’s bill does is return things to the status quo set by Donald Trump, saying bump stocks are dangerous and should be prohibited,” Schumer said. “Senate Republicans by and large supported Donald Trump’s ban on bump stocks back then, so they should support this bill today.”
The Information: Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025, the person involved in its supply chain and a person involved in the manufacturing of the headsets said.
Apple originally planned to divide its Vision line into two models, similar to the standard and Pro versions of the iPhone, according to people involved in its supply chain and former Apple employees who worked on the devices. Apple's decision to halt work on the next version of its high-end headset is the latest example of the company reshuffling priorities. Apple has ramped up work on AI-powered features while paring back money-losing projects like its self-driving car, which it canceled earlier this year after spending nearly a decade on development. Augmented reality is one of Apple's biggest bets. The company aims to eventually replace the iPhone with lightweight glasses, and the Vision Pro is the first step in building consumer and developer interest in that effort.
Wells Fargo's co-branded credit card partnership with fintech startup Bilt Technologies is causing the bank to lose up as much as $10 million monthly, according to a WSJ report. The bank agreed to a co-branded program with the fintech startup that most other big banks -- including JPMorgan Chase -- passed on, incorrectly modeled key assumptions and sees no path to profitability. The card, which allows users to pay rent without fees while earning rewards, has attracted many young customers. From the report: There is a reason why credit cards hadn't gained traction in the rent sector until Bilt came along. Most landlords didn't accept them because they refuse to pay card fees that get pocketed by the banks issuing them and often run between 2% and 3%.
Bilt structured the card so landlords won't incur the fees. Wells instead eats much of that. About six months after the credit card was launched, Wells began paying Bilt a fee of about 0.80% of each rent transaction, even though the bank isn't collecting interchange fees from landlords. It appears that the problem for Wells Fargo is that Bilt customers are savvy. They are making the rent payments, but not carrying balances or doing any other transactions through the card.
Lin Qi, chairman of China's Yoozoo Group and executive producer on Netflix's "The Three-Body Problem," is currently hospitalized in Shanghai following a suspected deliberate poisoning by colleague Xu Yao, who has been detained by police. Despite internal strife, Yoozoo reassured stakeholders that operations have returned to normal, with Lin in stable condition. Variety reports: Netflix announced in September that it will adapt all three books in the critically acclaimed "Three-Body Problem" sci-fi trilogy by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, with "Game of Thrones" creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo, set to write and executive produce. The streamer bought the rights to adapt the series in English from video game developer Yoozoo, a Shenzhen-listed firm that acquired the rights itself in 2015, and is currently at work on other Chinese-language film and TV adaptations of its own.
A male, 39-year-old patient surnamed Lin was "suspected of having been poisoned while receiving diagnosis and treatment at a hospital," the Shanghai Public Security Bureau said at 7pm local time Wednesday in a post on its official social media account. Police had received report of the incident last Thursday, Dec. 17. The statement continued: "After on-site surveys and investigations, it was discovered that Lin's colleague surnamed Xu (male, 39) was suspected of committing a major crime. At present, Xu has been criminally detained by the police in accordance with the law, and related investigations are being further carried out." The post did not tie the case directly to Yoozoo. Typical of such announcements in China, it also did not list either the victim or perpetrator's full name. Nevertheless, Chinese reports have tied the statement to 39-year-old Lin, who founded Yoozoo in 2009. Citing sources inside the firm, reports from outlets including respected financial publication Caixin identify the perpetrator as Yoozoo exec Xu Yao, 39. The University of Michigan Law School grad joined the company in 2017 and rose to become CEO of The Three-Body Universe, a branch of the broader group within its newer film production arm involved in managing and developing the "Three-Body" IP.
In recent days, Chinese media had written in a more speculative fashion about in-fighting among Yoozoo executives that had led to a poisoning. Some reports allege that Lin was poisoned via an aged, prized varietal of fermented tea known as pu'er. Yoozoo Group's co-president Chen Fang has previously denied such claims on social media, saying that "there's no in-fighting -- rumors are the real poison," according to such reports. But after the public security bureau post gave new credibility to earlier speculation, Yoozoo on Wednesday issued a formal statement on the matter. "Although the company's management has recovered from the emergency situation last week and resumed normal operations, some friends are still uneasy and members of the public are curious" about the affair, it began. The series was in hit by a previous conflict a few months after its announcement, "after certain U.S. politicians questioned the company for choosing to adapt a work by Liu," notes Variety. "The author has previously expressed support for Chinese government policies in Xinjiang, a region where Beijing has forcibly jailed more than a million ethnic minority Uyghurs in detention camps."
Adobe prioritized profits while spending years ignoring numerous complaints from users struggling to cancel costly subscriptions without incurring hefty hidden fees, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged in a lawsuit Monday.
According to the FTC, Adobe knew that canceling subscriptions was hard but determined that it would hurt revenue to make canceling any easier, so Adobe never changed the "convoluted" process. Even when the FTC launched a probe in 2022 specifically indicating that Adobe's practices may be illegal, Adobe did nothing to address the alleged harm to consumers, the FTC complaint noted. Adobe also "provides no refunds or only partial refunds to some subscribers who incur charges after an attempted, unsuccessful cancellation."
Adobe "repeatedly decided against rectifying some of Adobe’s unlawful practices because of the revenue implications," the FTC alleged, asking a jury to permanently block Adobe from continuing the seemingly deceptive practices.
French photovoltaics group Hespul tested solar panels installed in 1992, reports PV Magazine:
The testing showed that the modules still produce on average 79.5% of their initial power after 31 years of operation. In a previous testing carried out 11 years ago, the panels were found to produce 91.7% of their initial power. "This result exceeds the performance promised by the manufacturers who said the panels would have maintained 80% of their output after 25 years," said Hespul.
The drop in performance is on average 20.5%, or 0.66% per year over 31 years, and 1.11% per year over the last 11 years... Another more recent study carried out by the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on 1,700 American sites totaling 7.2 GW of power, showed a median degradation of around -0.75%/year. Moveover, another research study focused on 4,300 residential installations in operation in Europe and used different data processing methodologies. Depending on the methods, a median loss of -0.36% to -0.67%/year was obtained.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader storkus for sharing the news.
Oh good. Not that I use milk for anything other than baking at this point
Avian influenza outbreaks on US dairy farms have raised concerns about milk safety, leading some to consider alternatives like engineered milk proteins. Startups like Remilk and Alpine Bio are using yeast and soybeans to produce key milk proteins, aiming to replace dairy cows and reduce environmental impact. However, competing with subsidized dairy industries and their efficient use of cow byproducts remains a challenge for these biotech ventures, MIT Technology Review reports. The story adds: Everyone agrees that cow's milk will be difficult to displace. It holds a special place in the human psyche, and we owe civilization itself, in part, to domesticated animals. In fact, they've left their mark in our genes, with many of us carrying DNA mutations that make cow's milk easier to digest. But that's why it might be time for the next technological step, says Alpine's CEO Magi Richani. "We raise 60 billion animals for food every year, and that is insane. We took it too far, and we need options," she says. "We need options that are better for the environment, that overcome the use of antibiotics, and that overcome the disease risk." It's not clear yet whether the bird flu outbreak on dairy farms is a big danger to humans. But making milk without cows would definitely cut the risk that an animal virus will cause a new pandemic. As Richani says: "Soybeans don't transmit diseases to humans."
The House voted Thursday to reject an amendment to restore a racist Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The statue depicted a Black “mammy” holding a Confederate soldier’s baby and a Black enslaved person following a Confederate soldier into battle.
In a 230 to 192 vote, only 24 Republicans joined Democrats in opposition to the monument.
The Reconciliation Memorial, also called the “New South” monument, was erected in 1914 by famed white supremacist President Woodrow Wilson. An independent commission recommended the statue for removal in 2022. In December 2023, the Army, which operates Arlington National Cemetery, informed Congress that it intended to remove the statue.
Of the 192 Republicans who voted in support of restoring the racist monument, at least three of them are freshman members in precariously purple districts of New York. Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito of New York’s 4th congressional district, who’s facing a tough challenge with Democrat Laura Gillen, will have to answer for pictures he took at the Capitol with disgraced former Rep. George Santos.
Rep. Marc Molinaro of New York’s 19th Congressional District is facing a rematch against Democrat Josh Riley. Molinaro eked out the seat in 2022. And in April, Air Force veteran Sarah Klee Hood announced she would be challenging Republican Rep. Brandon Williams for the seat he barely won in New York’s 22nd congressional district. I suspect the challengers in these races will make sure to point out that New York was on the side of the Union during the Civil War.
The amendment was brought by Georgia gun shop owner-turned-congressman Andrew Clyde. This was not Clyde’s first time being racist about memorials. In 2022, Clyde led House Republicans in blocking a “routine measure” to name a federal courthouse in Florida after its first Black state supreme court justice, Joseph W. Hatchett.
Thursday’s House vote shows an increase in GOP support for white supremacist symbology since 2021 when only 120 Republicans voted against removing Confederate statues from the Capitol. I guess that’s what the GOP would call progress?
Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
And they don't care because they're completely immune from shame or criticism. Fuck the GOP and their black-robed puppets.
When a gunman opened fire at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Oct. 1, 2017, he killed 58 people and injured more than 800 in what was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Twelve of the 23 guns in his arsenal had bump stocks, devices that allow semiautomatic firearms to fire continuously after just one trigger pull. He fired more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition in just 10 minutes—a slaughter so horrific that the Trump administration responded with regulations banning bump stocks.
The six conservative Supreme Court justices who struck down that ban Friday are apparently immune to that horror.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority with a lengthy and creepy explanation—with diagrams—on guns and trigger mechanisms to justify overturning the ban. He explained that it couldn’t stand on the basis of semantics and what Congress meant when it defined machine guns, abandoning the supposed “textualist” conservative principle that the courts should respect the ordinary meaning of words in the law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called bullshit on the majority in her dissent for ignoring the “human act of the shooter’s initial pull” in an “interpretation [that] requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text." She called out each of the six conservatives for abandoning their textualist principles.
“Every Member of the majority has previously emphasized that the best way to respect congressional intent is to adhere to the ordinary understanding of the terms Congress uses,” Sotomayor wrote.
She then provided quotes from each of them:
Chief Justice Roberts: “[T]he legislative purpose is expressed by the ordinary meaning of the words used.”
Justice Thomas: “Statutory construction must begin with the language employed by Congress and the assumption that the ordinary meaning of that language accurately expresses the legislative purpose.”
Justice Alito: “We give the words of a statute their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning, absent an indication Congress intended them to bear some different import.”
Justice Gorsuch: “When called on to interpret a statute, this Court generally seeks to discern and apply the ordinary meaning of its terms at the time of their adoption.”
Justice Kavanaugh: Departing from “all indications of ordinary meaning” will “create regulatory uncertainty for the Federal Government … and regulated parties.”
Justice Barrett: declines to “artificially narrow ordinary meaning” to “second-guess [Congress’] judgment.”
“The majority’s reading flies in the face of this Court’s standard tools of statutory interpretation,” she wrote. “Today, the majority forgets that principle and substitutes its own view of what constitutes a ‘machine gun’ for Congress’.”
In doing so, the court just carved out a bump stock loophole from the plain text that will worsen the next mass shootings.
The Supreme Court justice flew to Montana and other destinations on the billionaire GOP donor’s dime. Crow’s lawyer revealed these flights to the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose ongoing investigation was sparked by ProPublica’s reporting.
by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica
Series: Friends of the Court:SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation's highest court.
Billionaire political donor Harlan Crow provided at least three previously undisclosed private jet trips to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in recent years, an investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats has found.
The flights, which were detailed by Crow’s lawyer in response to inquiries from the committee, took the justice to destinations including the region near Glacier National Park in Montana and Thomas’ hometown in Georgia.
The committee launched its investigation in response to ProPublica reporting last year that revealed numerous undisclosed gifts Crow provided to Thomas, including private school tuition for a relative and luxury vacations virtually every year for more than two decades. Democrats on the committee authorized a subpoena for information from Crow last November, but the subpoena was not issued, and the new information came as a result of negotiations between the Senate and Crow’s attorneys.
It’s possible more revelations are yet to come. The office of the panel’s chair, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that a report detailing the full findings of committee Democrats’ investigation would be released later in the summer.
“As a result of our investigation and subpoena authorization, we are providing the American public greater clarity on the extent of ethical lapses by Supreme Court justices,” Durbin said in a statement. He added that the newly discovered gifts make “crystal clear that the highest court needs an enforceable code of conduct.”
Crow’s office said in a statement that he gave the senators information covering the past seven years and that the committee “agreed to end its probe with respect to Mr. Crow.”
“Despite his serious and continued concerns about the legality and necessity of the inquiry, Mr. Crow engaged in good faith with the Committee,” the statement said.
Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The newly revealed flights add to the picture of Thomas’ frequent use of Crow’s jet for personal travel, allowing the justice to fly in the style of the ultrawealthy. Crow owns a high-end Bombardier Global 5000, a jet that can cost over $10,000 per flight hour to charter, according to charter company estimates. Thomas has repeatedly flown to a destination and back again on the same day.
The relationship between the two men began on Crow’s jet: In 1996, Crow offered to fly the justice to Dallas for a speech and while they were in the air, they hit it off, Crow has said. Crow has since flown Thomas to destinations around the world.
The new details released by the Senate don’t make clear the purpose of the trips, only listing flight dates and locations. They include a May 2017 trip from St. Louis to Kalispell, Montana — the location of Glacier Park International Airport — then from Montana to Dallas two days later. Thomas was scheduled to be in St. Louis at the time for a speech to a local bar association.
In one instance, he flew on June 29, 2021, from the East Coast to San Jose, California, and returned home later that day. In another, the justice took a round-trip flight on March 23, 2019, from Washington, D.C., to Savannah, Georgia.
ProPublica could not immediately find evidence of Thomas making public appearances in Montana, Georgia or California on the dates in question.
Last May, Senate Democrats requested detailed information from Crow about his relationship with Thomas, including an itemized list of all gifts he’d given to Supreme Court justices over the years. In November, Democrats upped the pressure by authorizing a subpoena. That decision met fierce Republican opposition, with GOP senators on the committee walking out of the hearing in protest.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats attempted to pass a bill that would tighten the court’s ethics rules and create a process for fielding and investigating complaints of potential misconduct. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called the legislation “unconstitutional overreach” and led a group of Republican senators who blocked the bill from advancing.
Last week, Thomas acknowledged for the first time that he should have told the public about food and lodging he received from Crow on a pair of free vacations, both of which were first uncovered by ProPublica. Thomas said he “inadvertently omitted” the gifts on previous financial disclosure filings. Thomas has not reported the recent private jet trips from Crow, which many legal experts have described as a violation of the federal financial disclosure law. Thomas’ attorney has maintained that the justice did not need to report the free flights.
The development of gene editing tools, which enable the specific targeting and correction of mutations, hold the promise of allowing us to correct those mutations that cause genetic diseases. However, the technology has been around for a while now—two researchers were critical to its development in 2020—and there have been only a few cases where gene editing has been used to target diseases.
One of the reasons for that is the challenge of targeting specific cells in a living organism. Many genetic diseases affect only a specific cell type, such as red blood cells in sickle-cell anemia, or specific tissue. Ideally, to limit potential side effects, we'd like to ensure that enough of the editing takes place in the affected tissue to have an impact, while minimizing editing elsewhere to limit side effects. But our ability to do so has been limited. Plus, a lot of the cells affected by genetic diseases are mature and have stopped dividing. So, we either need to repeat the gene editing treatments indefinitely or find a way to target the stem cell population that produces the mature cells.
On Thursday, a US-based research team said that they've done gene editing experiments that targeted a high-profile genetic disease: cystic fibrosis. Their technique largely targets the tissue most affected by the disease (the lung), and occurs in the stem cell populations that produce mature lung cells, ensuring that the effect is stable.
According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, TikTok is the second most popular source of news for Americans after X, "though most TikTok users don't primarily think of the shortform video app as a news source," notes The Verge. The survey looked at how Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X play a role in Americans' news diets. From the report: Among TikTok users, only 15 percent say keeping up with the news is a major reason they use the app. Still, 35 percent of those surveyed said they wouldn't have seen the news they get on TikTok elsewhere. And unlike other apps, the news users see on TikTok is just as likely to come from influencers or celebrities as it is from journalists -- and it's far more likely to come from total strangers. (Meanwhile, most Facebook and Instagram users say the news that pops up on their feeds is posted by friends, relatives, or other people they know; on X, users are more likely to see news posted by media outlets or reporters.)
Newsflash, GOP hacks behave like GOP hacks even when their bullshit causes and promotes mass death.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT - OCTOBER 5: A bump stock device, (left) that fits on a semi-automatic rifle to increase the firing speed, making it similar to a fully automatic rifle, is shown next to a AK-47 semi-automatic rifle, (right) at a gun store on October 5, 2017 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Congress is talking about banning this device after it was reported to of been used in the Las Vegas shootings on October 1, 2017. (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images)
The six Republican justices handed down a decision on Friday that effectively legalizes civilian ownership of automatic weapons. All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.
The Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill involves bump stocks, devices that allow ordinary semiautomatic weapons that can legally be owned by civilians to automatically fire, much like a machine gun designed for that purpose. Bump stocks cause a semiautomatic gun’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger, repeatedly “bumping” the trigger and making the gun rapidly fire.
A semiautomatic weapon refers to a gun that loads a bullet into the chamber or otherwise prepares itself to fire again after discharging a bullet, but that will not fire a second bullet until the shooter pulls the trigger a second time. An automatic weapon, by contrast, will fire a continuous stream of bullets.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor notes in her dissent, the Trump administration decided to ban bump stocks after a shooter opened fire on a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 in a matter of minutes. The shooter used bump stocks to kill so many people so quickly.
A 1986 law makes it a crime to own a “machinegun,” and the Trump administration determined that this law is broad enough to encompass bump stocks. That law defines a “machinegun” to include “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
Some courts concluded that the phrase “a single function of the trigger” should be read to mean, as one of those courts put it, “a single pull of the trigger from the perspective of the shooter.” Thus, a semiautomatic weapon equipped with a bump stock counts as a machine gun because “the shooter engages in a single pull of the trigger with her trigger finger, and that action, via the operation of the bump stock, yields a continuous stream of fire as long she keeps her finger stationary and does not release it.”
Writing for the Court’s Democratic minority, Sotomayor adopts this reading of the statute. In her words, “a machinegun does not fire itself. The important question under the statute is how a person can fire it.”
The other plausible reading of the statute focuses on whether the trigger itself moves back and forth each time a bullet is fired. Writing for the Court’s Republicans, Justice Clarence Thomas adopts this view, arguing that “all that a bump stock does is accelerate the rate of fire by causing these distinct ‘function[s]’ of the trigger to occur in rapid succession.”
Both of these outcomes can also be supported by competing rules guiding how statutes should be interpreted.
Though Thomas did not rely on this rule in his opinion, some lower courts applied the “rule of lenity” to justify ruling in favor of bump stocks. Generally, this rule establishes that, when a criminal law is ambiguous, the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of the defendants.
Alternatively, a rule known as the “presumption against ineffectiveness” cuts in the other direction. As the Supreme Court said in The Emily and the Caroline (1824), courts should avoid reading laws in ways that would render “the law in a great measure nugatory and enable offenders to elude its provisions in the most easy manner.” (“Nugatory” means that the law is inoperative or unable to function.)
Sotomayor argues in her opinion that this presumption against ineffectiveness favors her reading of the statute, because Thomas’s reading would effectively nullify the ban on machine guns. As she writes, “anyone shooting a bump-stock-equipped AR–15 can fire at a rate between 400 and 800 rounds per minute with a single pull of the trigger.”
So who is correct here? The honest answer is that both possible readings of the statute are equally permissible, which explains why the lower courts divided. What the Court’s decision in Cargill exposes is that not every statutory interpretation question has a clear answer, and judges can often pick the outcome that they want.
And so the six Republicans — members of a political party that typically supports gun rights, despite the Trump administration’s actions on bump stocks — picked the outcome that aligns with their political party’s pro-gun stance. The justices who belong to the Democratic Party, meanwhile, picked the outcome that aligns with their party’s position on guns.
A conservative advocacy group headed by scam artist Charlie Kirk is pushing Americans to drink raw milk at a time when a widespread flu outbreak makes this potentially fatal. This is just one of several moves by right-wing groups and media pundits since the Food and Drug Administration cautioned against drinking raw milk following the rapid spread of H5N1 bird flu among dairy cattle.
Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA founder and executive director
The group, Turning Point USA, is promoting T-shirts that display a “got raw milk?” logo. It is well-established by the FDA that there are absolutely no health benefits from drinking raw milk instead of pasteurized milk. Raw milk was dangerous even before the rapidly spreading flu and is known to spread multiple diseases, including tuberculosis.
Tests indicate that raw milk can transmit the H5N1 flu virus to lab animals, and cats have died from drinking infected milk. Consuming raw milk is a bad idea at any time, and it’s far more dangerous now.
Promoting the drinking of raw milk is, with no qualifications, a profoundly ludicrous idea. But we seem to have reached the stage where an FDA warning against jumping off cliffs would lead to a serious mess at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Not only do Turning Point USA's T-shirts promote the consumption of raw milk, but they do it with an image that isn’t even a dairy cow. However, there’s an even more glaring issue with the illustration:
Whatever that cow is producing, no one should be drinking it.
Dairy cattle in at least 12 states have been confirmed to be infected with H5N1 flu, also known as avian flu because it spreads easily among domestic and wild birds. The flu is not only killing cows, but it’s also wiping out millions of poultry. At least one dairy worker in Texas has been infected after handling infected cattle.
Past H5N1 strains have proven deadly for people, with a fatality rate of 56%. That makes this type of flu among the most dangerous and deadly diseases on the planet. By contrast, the fatality rate of COVID-19 stands at just over 1%, with many of the deaths happening early in the pandemic when there was no vaccine and little understanding of how to treat an infection. H5N1 flu is even more deadly than smallpox.
It is seriously bad stuff, which is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to limit opportunities for the virus to become transmissible from person to person.
Since the first grocery store milk tested positive for the flu in April, H5N1 has spread widely through the commercial milk supply, but pasteurization appears to make the milk safe to drink. Raw milk remains one of the few vectors, outside of working with infected cows or poultry, that can spread the disease to humans.
So naturally, Republicans are suddenly huge fans of drinking raw milk, even if they never gave a thought to it before. Raw milk is being promoted by right-wing media, and the FDA’s warning against drinking raw milk during the flu outbreak is being called a conspiracy between the government and "big milk."
PBS reported that raw milk sales “spiked” 21% in May despite warnings from the FDA and CDC. In most areas, getting raw milk requires a lot more effort than buying pasteurized milk at the grocery store. However, 18 states allow some form of retail sales for raw milk, and 14 others allow direct sales to people who visit dairy farms. Producers peddling raw milk also provide pages of absolute bullshit claiming that pasteurization destroys some health benefits of milk, which could be believable to those already inclined to believe that everything is a government conspiracy.
In other words, raw milk might not be in the fridge at Walmart or Piggly Wiggly, but it is accessible for anyone willing to look for it. It’s just that no one should be looking.
And no one, ever, under any circumstances, should listen to Charlie Kirk.
Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
Tesla shareholders have re-approved CEO Elon Musk's $44.9 billion pay package, the company announced today. "Our stockholders have approved the ratification of the 100 percent performance-based stock option award to Elon Musk that was approved by stockholders in 2018," Brandon Ehrhart, Tesla's general counsel and corporate secretary, announced at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting.
Ehrhart also said that shareholders approved a corporate move from Delaware to Texas, and the re-election of board members James Murdoch and Kimbal Musk (Elon Musk's brother). While the official announcement was made at the shareholder meeting late in the day on Thursday, Musk revealed that the yes votes were winning in a social media post last night.
"Both Tesla shareholder resolutions are currently passing by wide margins!" Musk wrote, referring to the pay vote and the move from Delaware to Texas. His post included charts indicating that both shareholder resolutions had more than enough yes votes to surpass the "guaranteed win" threshold.
Of course they're whining about paying for the damages they cause. They only want to privatize the profit and socialize the losses.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Chemical and manufacturing groups sued the federal government late Monday (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) over a landmark drinking-water standard that would require cleanup of so-called forever chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks. The industry groups said that the government was exceeding its authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act by requiring that municipal water systems all but remove six synthetic chemicals, known by the acronym PFAS, that are present in the tap water of hundreds of millions of Americans. The Environmental Protection Agency has said that the new standard, put in place in April, will prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious illnesses. The E.P.A.'s cleanup standard was also expected to prompt a wave of litigation against chemical manufacturers by water utilities nationwide trying to recoup their cleanup costs. Utilities have also challenged the stringent new standard, questioning the underlying science and citing the cost of filtering the toxic chemicals out of drinking water.
In a joint filing late Monday, the American Chemistry Council and National Association of Manufacturers said the E.P.A. rule was "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion." The petition was filed in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In a separate petition, the American Water Works Association and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies said the E.P.A. had "significantly underestimated the costs" of the rule. Taxpayers could ultimately foot the bill in the form of increased water rates, they said. PFAS, a vast class of chemicals also called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are widespread in the environment. They are commonly found in people's blood, and a 2023 government study of private wells and public water systems detected PFAS chemicals in nearly half the tap water in the country. Exposure to PFAS has been associated with developmental delays in children, decreased fertility in women and increased risk of some cancers, according to the E.P.A. [...] The E.P.A. estimates that it would cost water utilities about $1.5 billion annually to comply with the rule, though utilities have said the costs could be twice that amount. Further reading: Lawyers To Plastic Makers: Prepare For 'Astronomical' PFAS Lawsuits
Intel has begun ferrying around 20 "super loads" across Ohio for the construction of its new $28 billion Ohio One Campus. The extensive planning and coordination required for these shipments are expected to cause road closures and delays during the nine days of transport. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's new campus coming to New Albany, OH, is in heavy construction, and around 20 super loads are being ferried across Ohio's roads by the Ohio Department of Transportation after arriving at a port of the Ohio River via barge. Four of these loads, including the one hitting the road now, weigh around 900,000 pounds -- that's 400 metric tons, or 76 elephants. The super loads were first planned for February but were delayed due to the immense planning workload. Large crowds are estimated to accumulate on the route, potentially slowing it even further.
Intel's 916,000-pound shipment is a "cold box," a self-standing air-processor structure that facilitates the cryogenic technology needed to fabricate semiconductors. The box is 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 280 feet long, nearly the length of a football field. The immense scale of the cold box necessitates a transit process that moves at a "parade pace" of 5-10 miles per hour. Intel is taking over southern Ohio's roads for the next several weeks and months as it builds its new Ohio One Campus, a $28 billion project to create a 1,000-acre campus with two chip factories and room for more. Calling it the new "Silicon Heartland," the project will be the first leading-edge semiconductor fab in the American Midwest, and once operational, will get to work on the "Angstrom era" of Intel processes, 20A and beyond. The Ohio Department of Transportation has shared a timetable for how long this process will take.
Some lawmakers are talking about turning back the clock on divorce law.
Before the 1960s, it was really hard to get divorced in America.
Typically, the only way to do it was to convince a judge that your spouse had committed some form of wrongdoing, like adultery, abandonment, or “cruelty” (that is, abuse). This could be difficult: “Even if you could prove you had been hit, that didn’t necessarily mean it rose to the level of cruelty that justified a divorce,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina.
Then came a revolution: In 1969, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California (who was himself divorced) signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, allowing people to end their marriages without proving they’d been wronged. The move was a recognition that “people were going to get out of marriages,” Zug said, and gave them a way to do that without resorting to subterfuge. Similar laws soon swept the country, and rates of domestic violence and spousal murder began to drop as people — especially women — gained more freedom to leave dangerous situations.
Today, however, a counter-revolution is brewing: Conservative commentators and lawmakers are calling for an end to no-fault divorce, arguing that it has harmed men and even destroyed the fabric of society. Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, for example, introduced a bill in January to ban his state’s version of no-fault divorce. The Texas Republican Party added a call to end the practice to its 2022 platform (the plank is preserved in the 2024 version). Federal lawmakers like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, have spoken out in favor of tightening divorce laws.
If this sounds outlandish or like easily dismissed political posturing — surely Republicans don’t want to turn back the clock on marital law more than 50 years — it’s worth looking back at, say, how rhetorical attacks on abortion, birth control, and IVF have become reality.
And that will cause huge problems, especially for anyone experiencing abuse. “Any barrier to divorce is a really big challenge for survivors,” said Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “What it really ends up doing is prolonging their forced entanglement with an abusive partner.”
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, divorce is just one of many areas of family law that conservative policymakers see an opportunity to rewrite. “We’ve now gotten to the point where things that weren’t on the table are on the table,” Zug said. “Fringe ideas are becoming much more mainstream.”
Republicans in multiple states are eyeing divorce restrictions
Pushback against no-fault divorce dates back decades. In the 1990s and early 2000s, three states passed covenant marriage laws, allowing couples to opt into signing a contract allowing divorce only under circumstances like abuse or abandonment. Some backers of the laws intended them to send a larger anti-divorce message, the Maryland Daily Record reported in 2001. Speaker Johnson, then a lawyer in Louisiana, was an early adopter of covenant marriage, entering one with his wife Kelly in 1999.
More recently, high-profile conservative commentators have taken up the anti-divorce cause. Last year, the popular right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder announced his own unwilling split. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore,” he complained, “and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”
That could change. As Tessa Stuart noted in Rolling Stone, the Texas Republican party controls both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office, and could likely make its platform — the one calling on the state legislature to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws” — a reality if it chose. The Louisiana and Nebraska Republican parties have also considered or adopted similar language.
And Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development under President Donald Trump who has been floated as a potential VP pick, wrote in his recent book that “for the sake of families, we should enact legislation to remove or radically reduce incidences of no-fault divorce.”
Ending no-fault divorce would have major consequences
Opponents of no-fault divorce argue that it is hurting families and American culture. Making divorce too easy causes “social upheaval, unfettered dishonesty, lawlessness, violence towards women, war on men, and expendability of children,” Deevers wrote last year in the American Reformer, a Christian publication. “To devalue marriage is to devalue the family is to undermine the foundation of a thriving society.”
It’s worth noting that though the no-fault laws initially led to spikes in divorce, rates then began to drop, and reached a 50-year low in 2019, CNN reports. But today, an end to no-fault divorce would cause enormous financial, logistical, and emotional strain for people who are trying to end their marriages, experts say. Proving fault requires a trial, something many divorcing couples today avoid, said Kristen Marinaccio, a New Jersey-based family law attorney. A divorce trial is time-consuming and costly, putting the partner with less money at an immediate disadvantage. It can also be “really, really traumatizing” to have to take the stand against an ex-partner, Marinaccio said.
There’s also no guarantee that judges will always decide cases fairly. In the days of fault-based divorce, courts were often unwilling to intervene in marriages even in cases of abuse, Zug said.
No-fault divorce can be easier on children, who don’t have to experience their parents facing each other in a trial, experts say. Research suggests that allowing such divorces increased women’s power in marriages and even reduced women’s suicide rates. A return to the old ways would turn back the clock on this progress, scholars say.
“We know exactly what happens when people can’t get out of very unhappy marriages,” Zug said. “There’s much higher incidences of domestic abuse and spousal murder.”
It’s unlikely that blue states would ban no-fault divorce, Marinaccio said, but if red states do, their residents would be stuck. Divorce laws generally include a residency requirement, which would make it difficult for people to cross state lines to get a divorce the way they sometimes do now to obtain an abortion. “Your state is the only access you have to divorce,” Marinaccio said.
Divorce is extremely common — more than 670,000 American couples split in 2022 alone. Any rollback to no-fault divorce would likely be politically unpopular, even in red states (some of which have higher divorce rates than the national average).
But perhaps emboldened by their victory in overturning Roe v. Wade, social conservatives have gone after other popular targets in recent months, from birth control to IVF. The drive to increase restrictions on divorce is part of the same movement, Zug said — an effort to re-entrench “conservative family values,” incentivize heterosexual marriage and childbearing, and disempower women. “They are all connected,” Zug said.
US President Joe Biden speaks on lowering costs at the YMCA Allard Center in Goffstown, New Hampshire, US, on Monday, March 11, 2024. Biden's $7.3 trillion fiscal 2025 budget proposal, unveiled on Monday, lays out a second-term vision that would deliver more services, middle-class tax breaks and price controls to voters funded through higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Photographer: Jason Bergman/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The North Star of macroeconomic policy — the ideal point that fiscal and monetary measures are meant to lead us toward — is an America where jobs are abundant and prices rise by 2 percent a year.
And we might have just arrived in that place.
In May, the US economy added 272,000 jobs, far more than economists predicted. That same month, prices remained unchanged from April, and only 3.3 percent higher than they were one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released on Wednesday. These figures were both lower than anticipated.
What’s more, the official CPI data likely overstates the actual pace of price increases in the economy. This is because a major driver of overall inflation in recent months has been housing costs, and the Consumer Price Index’s measure of rental prices is out of date. The CPI measures what consumers are currently paying in rent, but most renters are paying rates that were set months ago, when they first signed their leases. In that time, the going rate for new leases has fallen, according to industry data. Thus, the actual market price of a rental unit today is lower than the average price that’s presently being paid.
Asking rents fell for a 10th straight month in May, according to a Realtor.com Rental Report released this week. The typical rent has now fallen by $24 since August 2022. By contrast, the new CPI data shows rent prices up 0.4 percent from April and 5.4 percent from one year ago.
As the economist Paul Krugman notes, if you remove outdated rental data from CPI, the inflation rate looks right in line with the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. In his view, this means that “inflation has basically been defeated.”
On its face, this would seem like great news for Joe Biden. Inflation has long been the president’s greatest political liability. If May’s trends continue and Biden presides over full employment and stable prices come Election Day, the case for Donald Trump’s candidacy might seem drastically weaker.
But there are three reasons for Democrats to fear that slowing inflation will prove too little, too late.
For one thing, voters’ distrust of Biden’s economic management appears unshakeable. In a recent Gallup poll, just 38 percent of Americans expressed confidence in Biden to “do the right thing for the economy.” That is up a smidgen from Biden’s 35 percent mark in 2023, but it is still the worst economic approval that any modern president has suffered in Gallup’s polling, with the exception of George W. Bush immediately after the financial crisis. By contrast, 46 percent of voters have confidence in Trump’s economic management.
In RealClearPolitics’s average of recent surveys, Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy by a 17.6 point margin. And voters’ appraisal of Biden’s economic acumen has not substantially improved in recent months, even as inflation has declined. By the end of Trump’s term, on the other hand, voters approved of his economic management by a 7.8 percent margin.
Thus, the idea that Biden is personally responsible for the surge of inflation in 2022 — and that he cannot be trusted to effectively manage the economy for that reason — appears deeply rooted in voters’ minds. The fact that wages have been rising much faster than prices for more than a year has left no dent on this impression. Another few months of falling inflation could move the needle a bit, but there’s little reason to assume that such a development will dramatically change public opinion.
Second, relatedly, historical precedent suggests that the economy’s performance up to this point in Biden’s term will matter more than its performance from now until November. According to Democratic data scientist David Shor, when you examine the relationship between GDP growth and past incumbent presidents’ electoral outcomes, their economic records between inauguration and April of their reelection year count for much more than economic conditions in their campaigns’ final months.
Finally, if inflation has truly been defeated, victory has come too late to yield substantial interest rate cuts before November. The Federal Reserve declined to reduce rates after its meeting this week and forecast a single, quarter-percentage-point cut by year’s end. Investors predict that such a cut will come in September at the earliest. Even if the rate cut comes before Election Day, it would still leave Americans with dramatically higher borrowing costs than they faced when Biden was inaugurated.
It is conceivable that a small September cut may help the president a bit at the margins. Another possibility is that Biden will effectively shepherd the nation out of an economic crisis and deliver it into a low-inflation, high-employment economy and then promptly hand the White House back to Donald Trump, who will proceed to receive the lion’s share of the credit when the Fed slashes interest rates next year.
LOL surprise surprise. Puritanism is obnoxious for machines too
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Stability AI released weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, an AI image-synthesis model that turns text prompts into AI-generated images. Its arrival has been ridiculed online, however, because it generate images of humans in a way that seems like a step backward from other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models like Midjourney or DALL-E 3. As a result, it can churn out wild anatomically incorrect visual abominations with ease. A thread on Reddit, titled, "Is this release supposed to be a joke? [SD3-2B]" details the spectacular failures of SD3 Medium at rendering humans, especially human limbs like hands and feet. Another thread titled, "Why is SD3 so bad at generating girls lying on the grass?" shows similar issues, but for entire human bodies.
AI image fans are so far blaming the Stable Diffusion 3's anatomy fails on Stability's insistence on filtering out adult content (often called "NSFW" content) from the SD3 training data that teaches the model how to generate images. "Believe it or not, heavily censoring a model also gets rid of human anatomy, so... that's what happened," wrote one Reddit user in the thread. The release of Stable Diffusion 2.0 in 2023 suffered from similar problems in depicting humans accurately, and AI researchers soon discovered that censoring adult content that contains nudity also severely hampers an AI model's ability to generate accurate human anatomy. At the time, Stability AI reversed course with SD 2.1 and SD XL, regaining some abilities lost by excluding NSFW content. "It works fine as long as there are no humans in the picture, I think their improved nsfw filter for filtering training data decided anything humanoid is nsfw," wrote another Redditor.
Basically, any time a prompt hones in on a concept that isn't represented well in its training dataset, the image model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for. And sometimes that can be completely terrifying. Using a free online demo of SD3 on Hugging Face, we ran prompts and saw similar results to those being reported by others. For example, the prompt "a man showing his hands" returned an image of a man holding up two giant-sized backward hands, although each hand at least had five fingers.
Former Delaware State Housing Authority director Eugene Young announced Wednesday that he was dropping out of the Sept. 10 Democratic primary, leaving state Sen. Sarah McBride on a glide path to become the first openly trans person to ever serve in Congress.
Young, who had the support of Gov. John Carney, was the only notable candidate vying with McBride for the Democratic nomination to replace Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester as Delaware's lone House member. (Blunt Rochester is all but assured of making history herself as both the first woman and first African American to ever represent the state in the Senate.) Still, he faced a tough battle against McBride, who ended March with a huge $1.9 million to $400,000 advantage in cash on hand.
The First State's candidate filing deadline—which is always one of the last in the nation—isn't until July 9, but it would be a huge surprise if any serious candidates entered the primary with so little time left on the clock. And given Delaware's reliably blue lean, the Democratic nominee is all but assured victory in the general election, especially in a year when favorite son Joe Biden is leading the ticket.
McBride won elected office for the first time in 2020 at the age of 30 when she became the first openly trans person to serve in the upper chamber of any state legislature. (Fellow Democrat Danica Roem became the second following her victory last year for a state Senate seat in Virginia.)
Describing that first campaign on "The Downballot" podcast last year, McBride said she "knew that the focus in the media was going to be around the uniqueness of my candidacy and the historic nature of the campaign." As a consequence, she knew she would "have to go out of my way to reinforce for folks that the most formative experience in my life is not my gender identity." That event, she explained, was her role in caring for her husband, who died after a battle with oral cancer.
While her gender identity remained a focus of media attention, McBride said that it "almost never came up on the campaign trail, and in the few instances where it came up, a smaller portion of those few instances were people with just genuinely earnest questions."
The state senator, when asked about her potential to make history at a time when Republicans are making opposition to trans rights a central part of their agenda, responded, "I think there's an important role that each person can have in Congress to push back. And I think without, though, a trans voice helping that effort, there's a lot of potential that's not met."
McBride is now poised to win a seat in Congress, a victory she said she hopes will pave the way to more electoral success for other trans people.
"[T]he only way I can truly do right by the trans community is first and foremost just to be the best member of Congress or the best state senator that I can be," she said. "And that will go a long way implicitly in pushing back, but also helping to create more doors and more opportunities for more trans people to serve in Congress because one out of 435 is still not representative of the population as a whole."
Abby Phillip exposed the GOP’s paradoxical responses to Hunter Biden's and Donald Trump’s convictions on CNN Wednesday.
"The moment, of course, creates the split screen of conservatives who just 12 days ago were slamming the rule of law, slamming the judge, the jury, and the verdict in Donald Trump's Manhattan trial,” she said. “Some even claimed the conviction was the end of the republic as we know it. But tonight they seem to be singing from a completely different tune."
She then showed a split screen supercut of Fox News pundits like Jeanine Pirro whining that Trump’s conviction “goes against the ilk of who we are as Americans and our faith in the criminal justice system” and subsequently describing Hunter’s conviction as proof “that clearly no one is above the law.”
It cannot be overstated how abjectly hypocritical the GOP’s reaction to Hunter’s conviction has been. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts pointed out in one of the many Republican-led committee circus hearings the disparity in responses from the right and the consistency in responses from the other side of the aisle—including from the president himself.
“Hunter Biden just became the Deep State’s sacrificial lamb to show that Justice is ‘balanced’ while the other Biden crimes remain ignored,” she tweeted.
It’s as if the GOP-controlled House should set up a committee of oversight so they can investigate all of these hidden “Biden crimes” that are being “ignored.” Maybe they could get someone like Rep. James Comer of Kentucky to investigate?
Regardless, in the end, there is no logic that can overcome MAGA’s cult-like obsession with feeling aggrieved.
Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
A new poll from Civiqs for Daily Kos shows that voters overwhelmingly know that convicted felon Donald Trump and President Joe Biden are basically the same age. So why does the traditional media keep covering them as if Biden is so much older? And why is the media—looking at you, The New York Times—so obsessed with ignoring the orange elephant in the room: Trump’s brain?
According to the new survey, 73% of registered voters correctly answer the age question saying Biden is a few years older—that includes 81% of regular Fox News viewers (although 5% of them say Biden is more than 10 years older, because Fox). That’s about the same as the 78% of regular MSNBC viewers who correctly identify the small age gap.
But the traditional media remains intent on portraying Biden as knocking on heaven’s door. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a massive hit piece on Biden pushing the GOP narrative in an article titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” Their sources? Republicans.
That’s to be expected of Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ, but the Times is hot on its heels in amplifying that narrative. As Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner detailed, the Times “filled every slot on its editorial page with a piece attacking Biden’s age and memory. That didn’t just include the Times’ conservative columnists calling for the president to step down, but the paper’s editorial board jumping in to tell you that Americans think Biden is too old.”
At the same time, the Times was insisting that Trump “does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways.” Okaaaay.
That’s mild compared to a recent Times story celebrating Trump’s post-conviction “hypermasculine appeal, and his defiance.”
What the NYT has not been devoting entire editorial pages to talking about is the convicted felon and his bonkers rallies. Like the one in Gettysburg in April. “Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look, and to watch, and, uh, the statement of Robert Lee—who's no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor—’Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.’” That’s some serious cofeve.
Nor does the Times talk about Trump’s reverence for the “late great Hannibal Lecter,” and his most recent foray into an off-script existential discussion about whether it’s better to be killed by a shark or electrocution in the water. Not to mention telling the Las Vegas MAGA crowd voters in a daytime rally in a heatwave “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote. I don’t care.”
Voters might care about both candidates’ ages, but they know enough about it at this point. What the Times and other traditional media should be talking about is which candidate has the mental fitness—and no criminal convictions—to serve.
Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg joins Markos to discuss the “red wave-ification” of the economy and how prepared Democrats are for November. There is still work to do but we have a better candidate—and we have the edge.
The Supreme Court is headed into its final few weeks with nearly half of the cases heard this year still undecided, including ones that could reshape the law on everything from guns to abortion to social media. The justices are also still weighing whether former President Donald Trump is immune from criminal prosecution in the election interference case against him, more than a month after hearing arguments.
The court heard 61 cases this term, and 29 remain unresolved, with some decisions expected Thursday and Friday.
Here's a look at some of the major undecided cases:
Presidential immunity
Donald Trump is arguing that former presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts they took in office and that the indictment he faces on charges of election interference must be dismissed.
The Supreme Court has previously ruled that former presidents can’t be sued in civil cases for what they did in office, but it has never weighed in on criminal immunity.
The timing of the decision may be as important as the outcome. Trump’s trial in Washington, D.C., may not take place before the November election, even if the court rules he is not immune.
Jan. 6, 2021
A former Pennsylvania police officer is challenging the validity of obstruction charges brought against hundreds of people who took part in the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump faces the same charge of obstructing an official proceeding.
The issue is whether a law meant to discourage tampering with documents sought in investigations can be used against the Capitol rioters.
Abortion pill
Abortion opponents are trying to make it harder for pregnant women to obtain medication abortions. They want the Supreme Court to roll back changes made by the FDA that have made it easier to obtain mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States last year. Those include eliminating the need for in-person visits and allowing the drug to be mailed.
Most Republican-led states have severely restricted or banned abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The high court’s decision in this case will affect abortion even in states where it remains legal.
Emergency abortion
There’s a second abortion case on the docket this year: whether doctors can provide that medical procedure in emergencies in states that banned abortion after the court overturned Roe v. Wade.
In a case out of Idaho, the Biden administration says abortions must be allowed in emergencies where a woman’s health is at serious risk.
The state argues that its strict abortion ban does allow abortions to save a woman’s life, and doesn’t need to expand exceptions for health risks.
Guns
The justices are weighing whether to uphold a federal law that seeks to protect domestic violence victims by keeping guns away from the people alleged to have abused them. An appeals court struck down a law that prohibits people under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. That court found that the law violated the 2nd Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” following the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that expanded gun rights and changed how courts are supposed to evaluate gun restrictions.
Homelessness
The most significant Supreme Court case in decades on homelessness centers on whether people can be banned from sleeping outdoors when shelter space is lacking.
A San Francisco-based appeals court decision said that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Leaders from California and across the West say that the ruling makes it harder for them to regulate homeless encampments encroaching on sidewalks and other public places.
Advocates say it would criminalize homelessness just as rising costs have pushed the number of people without a permanent place to live to record levels.
Bump stocks
The Trump administration banned bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows rapid fire like a machine gun, after they were used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The ban is being challenged by a Texas gun shop owner who says the Justice Department was wrong to reverse course and declare them illegal machine guns after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre.
The Biden administration argues banning them after the shooting that left 60 people dead was the right call.
Chevron
The justices could overturn a 40-year-old decision that has been cited thousands of times in federal court cases and used to uphold regulations on the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections. The decision colloquially known as Chevron calls on judges to defer to federal regulators when the words of a statute are not crystal clear. The decision has long been targeted by conservative and business interests who say Chevron robs judges of their authority and gives too much power to regulators.
Social media
Three cases remain unresolved at the intersection of social media and government.
Two cases involve social media laws in Texas and Florida that would limit how Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube and other social media platforms regulate content posted by their users. While the details vary, both laws aimed to address conservative complaints that the social media companies were liberal-leaning and censored users based on their viewpoints, especially on the political right.
In the third case, Republican-led states are suing the Biden administration over how far the federal government can go to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security. A federal appeals court sided with the states in finding that administration officials unconstitutionally coerced the platforms to limit conservative points of view.
Purdue Pharma
The Supreme Court controls the fate of a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would allocate billions of dollars to combat the opioid epidemic, but also provide a legal shield for members of the Sackler family who own the company. The settlement has been on hold since last summer after the Supreme Court agreed to weigh in.
Wealth tax
A business-backed challenge to a tax on foreign income is being watched closely for what it might say about the fate of a wealth tax, an often discussed but never implemented tax on the wealthiest Americans.
Air pollution
Republican-led, energy-producing states and the steel industry want the court to put the Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution-fighting “good neighbor” plan on hold while legal challenges continue. The plan aims to protect downwind states that receive unwanted air pollution from other states.
SEC
Another important regulatory case could strip the SEC of a major tool in fighting securities fraud and have far-reaching effects on other regulatory agencies. The court is being asked to rule that people facing civil fraud complaints have the right to a jury trial in federal court.
Any LGBTQ person that votes for the GOP had better be into very long-term chastity play because no one should ever touch them again.
HAMTRAMCK, MICHIGAN - JUNE 24: Gay Pride flags fly at a protest rally opposing the City of Hamtramck's recent resolution banning the flying of LGBTQ+ flags, political flags, and flags symbolizing any race or religion on City property, at City Hall on June 24, 2023 in Hamtramck, Michigan. Last Tuesday's vote on the resolution by the Hamtramck City Council was unanimous 6-0, and has drawn criticism from some Michigan elected officials. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
The 2024 election has been a bit weird for President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats. According to most polls, the president’s support among traditionally Democratic constituencies has slipped severely. Significant numbers of Black voters, Latino voters and young voters — who turned out strongly for Biden during his 2020 victory — seem to be prepared to sit out the election, or even cross over to vote for Donald Trump.
Will LGBTQ Americans, another bedrock Democratic constituency, join that movement?
The limited polling we have puts Biden well ahead among LGBTQ voters. But to win in November, Biden doesn’t just need to beat Trump among LGBTQ voters. He needs to win by the kind of majorities he posted in 2020.
And on that front, the two recent polls we have tell an unclear story.
Exit polling in 2020 had Biden beating Trump among LGBTQ voters by 64 percent to 27 percent — a 37-point advantage.One poll, released in March by the LGTBQ visibility group GLAAD, put Biden’s 2024 election support roughly on par with where it was in 2020 exit polling. But another, from the nonpartisan Independent Center think tank, showed his margin over Trump slipping down to a 29-point edge.
(There’s a caveat here: Ideally, we’d have more polls of LGBTQ voters to draw from. Additionally, LGBTQ voters are not a monolith, and anecdotes suggest real cleavages within the community. But polling down to the subgroup level gets difficult, as small sample sizes yield unreliable results. So we’re working with what we have.)
So which is it? Is Biden hemorrhaging support among LGBTQ voters? Or is his support holding steady?
After discussions with experts and deep dives into the polling, a more nuanced depiction of LGBTQ voters comes together.
On the one hand, LGBTQ voters are becoming more numerous, as greater shares of the American public than ever before feel comfortable coming out and identifying as something other than heterosexual. As this identity becomes more mainstream, it’s possible that the perspectives of its members will as well, with their views coming to resemble those of the public as a whole. Specifically and in the current context, that would mean an increased focus on the economy, and a de-emphasis on issues of identity.
But in the case of LGBTQ voters, broader public acceptance has not been matched by more supportive treatment from elected officials. In recent years, the Republican Party has leaned hard into transphobia and against LGBTQ visibility in public life — a force that may push more members of the community away from the GOP and back toward Democrats.
The picture that emerges is a voting group shifting its priorities and diversifying its viewpoints as it grows, but despite that communal metamorphosis, the community may remain tightly loyal to Democrats in 2024 — thanks to a Republican Party that is moving away from LGBTQ voters faster than they’re approaching it.
Why LGBTQ voters have traditionally picked Dems over the GOP
Though a small segment of the electorate (they made up about 7 percent of the 2020 electorate),LGBTQ voters have proven to be an influential part of the Democratic coalition. They have tended to be a higher-propensity voting group — likelier than the average voter to turn out.
“It’s kind of remarkable that LGBT voters are actually as cohesive as they are,” Andrew Flores, an assistant professor of government at American University, told me. “How does one’s experience maybe growing up in a very wealthy household, maybe a southern conservative environment, gel with someone who maybe grew up working-class, Latino, and in an urban center?”
Flores and other scholars of LGBTQ identity use two complementary theories to describe and explain how LGBTQ voters came to behave as a voting bloc:
A sense of linked fate between and among LGBTQ people and
Encounters with “conversion experiences” that expose LGBTQ people to discrimination and adversity.
Under the “linked fate” framework, LGBTQ people’s cohesion as a group is explained by these voters looking out into the world and making up their minds about politics by thinking of themselves not as individuals but as a community. “They ask the question ‘what would this party do to queer people,’ as opposed to ‘am I directly going to be affected by voting this way or that way?’,” Flores said. “ You think about what the outcomes would be for the group, and you tie your fate to what you think would be the group’s outcome.”
The “conversion experience” framework also emphasizes the power of community, but adversity plays a bigger role. Through encounters with discrimination in the workplace, everyday stigma, and violence, marginalization reinforces the importance of that queer identity.
“Adversity does kind of reinforce how important identity is to your well-being,” Flores said.
Reinforcing both theories is the role of the coming-out experience: Flores pointed to research from Hunter College that found the age range in which young lesbian, gay, and bisexual people experienced the coming out process also tended to be the time in which they became more politically progressive, in addition to becoming more politically aware and engaged.
“So there is this idea that coming out and affirming that identity reinforces how much politics can be an important factor for these individuals, and also led to them becoming slightly less religious as well,” Flores said. “So the actual process of coming out might have some transformative aspects to it that may cut across race, ethnicity, and class components [of individual identity].”
Are LGBTQ voters abandoning Biden? The case for “yes.”
While polling of LGBTQ Americans can be difficult, trends over the last few election cycles do show some churn in the community’s voting. From 1992 to 2016, exit polling showed a consistent trend with the LGBTQ share of the electorate getting more Democratic.
In 2012, for example, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among these voters by more than 50 points, garnering the support of about three-quarters of this demographic. In 2016, Hillary Clinton widened this margin into a chasm, winning 77 percent of the LGBTQ vote and holding a 63-point advantage over Trump, who tied with George H. W. Bush for the worst Republican performance with these voters in history.
But 2020 was different. Trump improved over that 2016 rock-bottom. Just how large that improvement was is still under dispute, but it’s generally agreed upon that Trump won at least a quarter of LGBTQ voters, cutting into the Democratic margin by at least 20 points.
The most recent polling shows this balance holding steady, or even continuing to shift away from Biden. The most optimistic poll, released by GLAAD and a Democratic pollster, shows Biden holding about the same share of the LGBTQ vote as he did in 2020; the more concerning one from the Independent Center shows additional erosion, winning about 56 percent of the vote.
Additional signs of discontent and change come from what LGBTQ voters are telling pollsters about the 2024 election. They state that, just like the average American, the economy, prices, and inflation are their top concerns when deciding their vote. A significant share also routinely tell pollsters that they identify as moderates, centrists, or independents. And the Independent Center survey also found that even if LGBTQ Americans identify as more progressive than the average American, they still want their elected officials to be more centrist.
“Part of the reason [we see some changes] is that people might just feel more comfortable coming out because there’s no stigma attached,” Gabriele Magni, an assistant professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University, told me. “There is more acceptance, more positive role models, and younger people feel more comfortable talking about their orientation and gender identity because of this.”
That shift toward mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ identity also raises an interesting question backed up by these voter trends: as LGBTQ Americans feel less rejection, grow as a segment of the population, and gain rights and protections, it’s possible that this element of their identities becomes less central and salient to how they make political and voting decisions, and other aspects of class, race, or education become more important.
Other groups have followed this trajectory previously. Among white Americans, for example, Italian American, Irish American, and Catholic voters have historicallybehaved as voting blocs in various eras of US politics. They backed Democrats before shifting into swing-voter status or dissolving as a discrete category as they faced less discrimination, diversified, and became part of mainstream white America.
Since the start of the Trump era, too, Hispanic and Latino Americans, previously a sharply defined bedrock Democratic constituency, have become a larger share of the electorate, assimilated, and become the country’s newest swing voters.
And polling of this election even shows distinct divisions within Democrats’ most loyal voting group: young Black voters and older Black voters have different degrees of affinity for Democrats, potentially because of fading memories of the Civil Rights era.
Are LGBTQ voters abandoning Biden? The case for “no.”
But while the LGBTQ community has undergone changes, so has the GOP. Patrick Egan, an associate professor of politics and public policy at NYU, told me that the Republican Party’s active role in antagonizing LGBTQ people cannot be understated.
Egan, who was also one of the researchers behind the Hunter College study on coming out experiences, said the GOP’s turn against LGBTQ people, their identity, and their rights is a major reason voters won’t consider these candidates.
“Typically when marginalized groups gain rights and power, the expectation is that they’ll kind of look a little bit more like the general electorate. In this case, it would not be a bit surprising to see LGBTQ voters start to become more conservative, more drawn to the Republican Party, as they get marriage and as they get non-discrimination protections, etc,” he said. “What’s really remarkable is that we’re just not seeing it.”
Had the Republican Party continued to move in a more liberal direction, it might have been more likely that 2024 would see more of a political realignment among these voters.
In 2010, when Congress passed legislation repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy banning LGBTQ servicemembers from serving openly in the military, eight Senate Republicans and 15 House Republicans joined Democrats in supporting repeal. In 2022, 11 Senate Republicans and 47 House Republicans voted to codify protections for same-sex marriages.
But in recent years, Republicans have embraced an anti-transgender panic. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has led this charge, but he’s backed by other prominent officials and media figures, and GOP-led state legislatures in many states have passed anti-trans legislation.
This shift has likely made LGBTQ identity more salient to members of the community, driving them away from a hostile GOP.
This also shows up in polling: Though there’s broad dissatisfaction with Biden and his presidency and a desire for the Democratic Party to do more to protect the rights of queer and trans Americans, views of the Republican Party and Trump are significantly more negative. And baked into some of the concerns about the economy and inflation is a desire by LGBTQ voters for the Republican Party to care more about kitchen-table issues than about social or culture war fascinations, like banning medical care for trans youth.
“Regardless of your positions on other issues, to the extent that being queer is important to you, you’re seeing big, big differences between the two parties on this very, very important issue. And so that’s going to keep a lot of LGBTQ voters voting for Democrats who otherwise would find the Republican Party more favorable,” Egan said.
Still, every expert I spoke with reached a similar conclusion — that none of this should lull Democrats into complacency, and that it’s not a given that LGBTQ voters will forever stay loyal Democrats.
“Generational turnover happens. Replacement happens. And you might get a more progressive LGBTQ voting bloc in the short term, but in the long, long run, the notion that you might have LGBTQ people who will vote Republican or who will not have to think about their LGBTQ identity as a factor of their vote is sort of a measure of success for the movement,” Flores said. “Greater political heterogeneity might be a signal that these identities are no longer being politicized or marginalized. But it’s hard to look out at contemporary politics and say that that’s going to happen right now.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shaprio has a simple message for convicted felon Donald Trump: “Quit whining.”
During an interview with Jen Psaki Wednesday, Shapiro said that, while he couldn’t say for certain how Pennsylvanians will vote in November, he thinks that they want to "be led by someone who is honest and decent. Someone who's actually on their side.”
“All they hear from Donald Trump is a whole bunch of whining about this country. And I think Donald Trump's got to quit whining, got to quit trying to divide us,” he added.
Shapiro compared the state of the U.S., which is producing more energy than ever before in a thriving economy, to Trump’s disparaging of the country. Trump has said things like the U.S. is “worse than a third world country.”
“So I got a message to Donald Trump and all his negativity and his whining,” Shapiro said. “Stop shit talking America. This is the greatest country on Earth, and it's time that we all start acting like it.”
“The good people of Pennsylvania understand that this is a great country. Understand that we got a whole lot going for us, and now it's time for us to continue this path of progress that Joe Biden has laid out and not go back to a negative time, not listen to the whining of the former president, and instead focus on a positive future for all of us," he added.
Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “teflon Don" is no more?
