Daily Archives: May 9, 2021

What will Facebooks ban mean for Donald Trumps future? – Brookings Institution

Posted: May 9, 2021 at 11:33 am

Today Facebooks Oversight Board, (its self-designated supreme court) upheld the decision to ban Trump from its platform. His account was suspended the day after the January 6 insurrection for his role in promoting and condoning the violent attacks on the Capitol that resulted in 5 deaths, at least 138 injuries, destruction of property, and over 400 arrests so far. However, the board took issue with the indefinite nature of the ban. The ruling stated that Facebook itself should reevaluate the ban within 6 months of this decision.

For four years the press and the public reacted to an unprecedented barrage of Trump Facebook posts and tweetssometimes appearing early in the morning or late at night. It wasnt too hard to distinguish between his own messaging and official messaging. His own was more outrageous, more prone to spelling errors and often at odds with what the rest of his government was saying. His musings appeared regularly on television news shows, often followed by administration officials trying gamely to figure out what he meant or how it wasnt really the opposite of what his government had just said.

And then, because of decisions by Facebook and Twitter, he went dark only a few weeks before he left office for what has been a relatively quiet retirement at Mar a Lago. What impact did going dark have on his popularity?

Following is a graph from RealClearPolitics that charts the average of Trumps approval ratings starting on January 6, the day of the insurrection at the Capitol, to the end of April. On the day of the insurrection Trump was viewed unfavorably by slightly more than half of the public and the gap between his unfavorable ratings and his favorable ratings was 10.5%. Ten days after the insurrection, as more and more people digested Trumps role in what happened that day, the gap between his unfavorable ratings and his favorable ratings grew to 21.6% of the public. But in the months following he gained back some of what he had lost and the gap has remained more or less stableat about 16% as of the end of April.

So far three months of relative silence from Trump on social media do not seem to have affected his standing with hardcore supporters that appear to constitute between 35% and 41% of the electorate. These numbers are more or less the same as Trumps numbers throughout most of the second, third and fourth years of his presidency, which were notable for the fact that unlike previous presidents he never obtained favorable ratings from 50% of voters. The stability in Trumps numbers leads to a variety of hypotheses about the importance of social media.

First, it is possible that Trump supporters, hostile to the media and big corporations, do not respond to survey research and thus support for Trump is lower in polls than it is in reality. This possibility is supported by the fact that turnout for Trump in the actual 2020 election was far greater than many polls had predicted.

The second possibility is that the impact of social media on politics is not as influential as members of the political establishment and the press think it is. A Pew poll from this spring found that 70% of social media users never or rarely post or share about political, social issues.

In other words, a subsection of the populationprobably the same people who, in a different generation would have been mailing letters or calling into radio showscreate a large portion of the social media noise.

The third possibility is that by the time of his election loss Trump had created a hardcore base within the Republican Party that was powerful enough to dictate internal party decisions. Look, for instance, at the attempt to dislodge Trump critic Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership position. That base may have solidified to the point where it does not need constant tending by Trump himself, thus making access to social media platforms less crucial. In spite of his being banned from social media his support among Republican voters has remained strong this year, as the following table using data from the Morning Consult/Politico poll indicates.

Table 1: Donald Trumps favorability among Republican voters (Morning Consult/Politico)

This strength, however, may have come at a cost. While Trump appears to have solidified his hold over the Republican Party, he also appears to have damaged the brand. Gallup has asked about party identification in polls going back decades. By the end of the first quarter of 2021 they found that people who identify as Democrats were more numerous than people who identified as Republicans by a margin of 49% to 40%. This is the biggest gap in party identification in a decade. It also correlates with an increase in people who say they are independent.

My final hypothesis is that even if Trump does return to social media, it is possible that his pronouncements will not be magnified by the mainstream press, especially television, now that he is no longer president. During his presidency Trumps most outrageous lies were covered because he was the president and many reporters and editors felt that they had an obligation to report what the president said. They may not feel the same obligation to an ex-president in Florida. (In the week after he was silenced, misinformation about the election dropped 73% according to a study by Zignal Labs.) This possibility has, no doubt, been a concern to Trump who just recently launched a new site From the Desk of Donald J. Trump as a way of getting around the social media ban.

So while todays decision has momentous consequences for social media in the coming decade, it may not have momentous consequences for Donald Trumps future. He remains the undisputed leader of a political party but that party has lost two elections in a row (2018 and 2020). In four years as president of the United States he was unable to expand his base. And now, the changing demographics of the country seem to be working against him. With or without social media he may have trouble expanding his following enough to become president again.

See more here:

What will Facebooks ban mean for Donald Trumps future? - Brookings Institution

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on What will Facebooks ban mean for Donald Trumps future? – Brookings Institution

Murphy gliding in NJ’s primary; GOP wrestling with Trump – Associated Press

Posted: at 11:33 am

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) New Jersey Republicans will decide whether they want an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump to be their standard bearer in the fall election for governor, while Democratic incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy is on an easy path toward capturing his partys nomination.

New Jerseys June 8 primary is just a month away, with some clear contours already emerging.

Murphy is aiming to become the first Democrat since 1977 to win reelection in a state where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by more than 1 million voters. On the GOP side, many in the party have lined up behind Jack Ciattarelli, a one-time Assembly member, accountant and small business owner. Ciattarelli is focusing his attacks on Murphy, but he faces competition from candidates embracing Trump.

A closer look at how the race is shaping up:

MURPHY CRUISING

Murphy wont have any challenger on the ballot for the Democratic primary. State officials ruled that two would-be challengers filed faulty petitions to get on the ballot last month.

That means Murphy, who is the head of the Democratic Party in the state, will secure the nomination.

It also means he wont have to burn cash to fend off attack and can instead focus on November.

A Monmouth University poll out Wednesday showed Murphy with a 57% approval rating, down from 71% at the height of the outbreak last year, but still in positive territory.

That poll surveyed 706 New Jersey adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

If he wins in November, hell be the first Democrat to win reelection in more than four decades.

As governor, he has a pulpit during his usually twice-weekly COVID-19 news conferences, which are streamed live on YouTube.

And despite some squabbles with fellow Democrats who control the Legislature, he has achieved a number of key campaign promises: phasing in a $15 minimum wage, enacting recreational marijuana legalization, raising taxes on millionaires, expanding gun control legislation and expanding paid family leave. A big unfished campaign promise is the establishment of a state bank.

___

REPUBLICAN RIVALS

Ciattarelli is the only one of the four Republicans running for governor to qualify for public matching funds. He has also received support from county Republican parties up and down the state.

Ciattarelli ran four years ago for governor, but lost the nomination to then-Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno. He launched his campaign for governor almost as soon as Murphy took office in 2018.

Ciattarelli had been critical of former GOP Gov. Chris Christie and President Donald Trump. Still, in a GOP primary, hes highlighted the support he received from Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Trump favorite who left the Democratic Party and fully embraced the president over his opposition of the first impeachment.

Hes focused much of his campaign squarely on Murphy, calling for reopening from pandemic closures sooner and making the state more affordable.

Also seeking the nomination are Hudson County pastor Phil Rizzo, who recently posted a photo of himself alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Hirsh Singh, a former unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 2017, and Brian Levine, an accountant and former county elected official. Singh has also been a vocal Trump supporter. Levine has called for the party to stop arguing over Trump and focused reining in tax rates.

___

THE FUNDRAISING PICTURE

Based on the available public records, Murphy is leading the fundraising contest by a lot. Hes brought in $3.4 million, according to the Election Law Enforcement Commission, and gotten $4.1 million in public matching funds.

Ciattarelli has raised nearly $1 million and received $3.6 million in matching funds.

Data for the other GOP candidates, who havent qualified for public funds, will become available later this month.

The matching fund program goes back to 1974 and allows candidates to get $2 in public cash for every $1 raised. Candidates must raise $490,000 to qualify for the funds. Theres a cap of $4.6 million and spending for candidates getting public money is limited to $7.3 million in the primary.

More here:

Murphy gliding in NJ's primary; GOP wrestling with Trump - Associated Press

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Murphy gliding in NJ’s primary; GOP wrestling with Trump – Associated Press

Caitlyn Jenner praises Donald Trump and says she’s in favor of building ‘the wall’ in Sean Hannity interview – Business Insider

Posted: at 11:33 am

Caitlyn Jenner praised Donald Trump for "disrupting" American politics and said she aims to do the same if she is elected to office in her first major TV interview as a candidate for California governor.

The 71-year-old former Olympian and reality TV star, who came out publicly as a trans woman in 2015, spoke with Fox News' Sean Hannity from her private airplane hangar in Malibu, California.

Jenner has no previous political experience. But during the 2016 election, she publicly supported Donald Trump and now counts several former Trump aides including Brad Parscale, who headed Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, as her advisers.

"What I liked about Donald Trump is he was a disruptor, you know," she said. "He came in and shook the system up, OK. A lot of people didn't like that in Washington, D.C., but he came in and shook the system up. I think he did some things that I agree with, some things I didn't agree with on trans issues, LGBT issues. I was more hopeful at the beginning. And but there were some good things he did."

"On the other hand, Biden, I don't think I've agreed with anything," she continued. "I don't think since he's been in there, he has done anything for the American worker, maybe other ones ... It is a 180-degree turn in our country, going the other direction, and it scares me."

Earlier this week, Jenner released her first campaign video in which she describes herself as a "compassionate disruptor." And later during her interview with Hannity, Jenner categorized herself as "an outsider" and said she wants to surround herself "with some of the smartest people out there" to develop her political brief.

"I'm in a race for solutions. I need to find solutions to be able to turn this state around," she said. "I absolutely love this state. I'm a fighter. Always have been."

The pair also discussed immigration policy, and the former reality TV star said she is "all for the wall," referencing Donald Trump's defunct plan to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.

"I would secure the wall. We can't have a state, we can't have a country without a secure wall," she said.

"You have two questions here, one is stopping people from coming in illegally into the state. And then the second question is, what do we do with the people that are here? We are a compassionate country, OK? We are a compassionate state. Some help, I mean, some people we're going to send back, OK? No question about that. But I have met some of the greatest immigrants into our country."

At one point during the interview, Jenner mistakenly said she was "pro-illegal immigration" before Hannity corrected her.

"You're pro legal immigration," he said.

"Legal immigration, yes," Jenner replied. "Thanks for catching me. You've got my back Sean, I appreciate that."

Jenner first announced her candidacy via a statement posted to Twitter late last month. If elected, she would be the first trans governor elected in the United States.

Read the original:

Caitlyn Jenner praises Donald Trump and says she's in favor of building 'the wall' in Sean Hannity interview - Business Insider

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Caitlyn Jenner praises Donald Trump and says she’s in favor of building ‘the wall’ in Sean Hannity interview – Business Insider

Trump wouldn’t be the first ex-president to run again but he might be the last – Salon

Posted: at 11:33 am

As I write this article, Arizona Republicans are conducting a fake audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, the state's major population center. The purpose of that audit, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte accurately observes, is to satisfy Donald Trump and his supporters by doing two things. First, itapplies unproved conspiracy theories to the recount process in the hope of "proving" Trump actually won the state. More importantly, itdemonstrateshow easy it would be for Republicans to steal elections if Trump supporters and their ilk controlled the political process.

Since the most direct way for the Trump movement to gain power would be for Trump himself to be elected again in 2024, this article will look at a phenomenon that has recurred several times in American history: a defeated ex-president running again. (Only one actually won. We'll get to that.) Of course it's alsopossible that a future Trump-style movement could be led by a pseudo-Trumpsuck-up like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz or Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The fundamental difference between Trump and other ex-presidents who have considered or attempted a political comeback is the question ofattitude. Prior to Trump, former presidents who tried to run again did so by appealing to democratic instincts. Sometimestheir party leaders believed they were the most electable alternative. Sometimes theyran asthird-party candidates to advance causes they believed were important.

Trump, by contrast, would run in 2024based on the assumption that power is his right, and something only he (or his sycophantic followers)are allowed to hold. Hehas conditioned his supporters since the 2016 election cycle to believe that the only possible outcomes whenhe's a candidate are thathe wins the election or the electionwas stolen. This disturbing personality trait, which hasbound many people to him through a process known asnarcissistic symbiosis,is why many people (including this author) believed that Trump would try to stagea coup if he lost the 2020 election. It didn't help that, as scientists have demonstrated,many Trump supporters are also motivated by their own insecure conception of masculinity.

Trump has already destroyed many of the precedents that would stop the rise of an authoritariandictator. He has used fascistic tactics to create a cult of personality that hisparty is expected to slavishly follow, has become the first incumbent president tolose an election and refuse to accept the result and has spread a Big Lie about his defeatso that his followers will believe he has a right to be returned to power. Most significantly, he actually egged on his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a futile attempt to overturn the election results.

The good news is that the Trump movement represents a minority point of view. The bad news is, that may not matter. If Trump stages a successful comeback, it won't be viewed in normal political terms, as an ex-president losing one election and then being vindicated in another. It will be perceived as a validation of all of Trump's fascist, dishonest behavior and will provide him all the justification he needsto stay in power indefinitely.

Nothing like that was ever the case for any of the other ex-presidents who tried to return to power. Let me clarify that I'm including some borderline cases ofex-presidents who launchedhalf-hearted efforts to get back in the gamebut never waged full campaigns, as well as those who were encourage to run again by othersbut chose not to.

The first defeated ex-presidentto seriously consider another run was Martin Van Buren, who had been narrowly elected overWilliam HenryHarrison in 1836, and then lost to Harrison four years later. (Harrison went on to have the shortest tenure of any president, dying of a severe infection after 31 days in office.) Because of Van Buren'sclose ties to Democratic Party founder Andrew Jackson who had chosen him as his running mate for Jackson's second term Van Buren was originally viewed as a leading contenderfor the 1844 nomination, at leastuntil he came out against annexing Texas on the grounds that it could spark a war withMexico (as in fact it did). Democratic slaveholders wanted to annex Texas so they could expand slavery throughout the West, so Van Buren was suddenly no longer a viable candidate. Four years later, Van Buren was nominated as a third-party candidate by the Free Soil Party, which wanted to gradually abolish slaveryby prohibiting its expansion into the newly-acquired western territories.

The next ex-president to take a shot at the White House didn't do so for a noble cause. Millard Fillmorehad been elected vice president as Zachary Taylor's running mate in 1848, and served nearly three years as president after Taylor's death. The Whig Party didn't even nominate Fillmore to run for a full term in 1852, and he wound up running in 1856 as the candidate of the Know Nothing Party, which wasopposedto immigration and especially the large numbers ofIrish Catholics then arriving in the country.Fillmore did extremely well for a third-party candidate, winningmore than 21 percent of the popular vote and Maryland's electoral votes. Sincethe Whig Party had just collapsed, Fillmorehad a hypotheticalopportunity to turn the Know Nothings into America's second major party but did not even come close, with the newly-formed Republicans surging onto the scene. The Know Nothings dissolved a few years later, as did any chance of Fillmore becoming president again.

For more than 20 years after Fillmore, noex-president actively triedfor a restoration. Then, in the 1880 election, a powerful faction of Republicans wanted Ulysses S. Grant to be their nominee, even though the Civil War hero had already served two terms, leaving office in 1877. Rutherford B. Hayes, the president elected in the notorious compromise of 1876, was not running again, and Republicans needed a candidate. (The 22nd Amendment had not yet been passed, so there was no legal impediment to Grant running again.)Grant had been a great general but controversial president, due to a series of scandals that beset his administration, but was still a widely beloved figure.The Republican convention was sharply divided between Grant's supporters and his opponents.Although Grant had more delegates than any other candidate, he could not muster a majority, and delegates eventually united around a compromise candidate, James Garfield, who went on to win the election.

Twelve years later, in 1892, the above-referenced Grover Cleveland became the first and only ex-president to be electedto a second, non-consecutive term. There were a number of reasons why that worked: Democraticleaders trusted Cleveland's conservative economic philosophy and thought he was electable, which was reasonable enough, since Cleveland actually won the popular vote in 1888, despite losing the election toBenjamin Harrison (grandson of William Henry Harrison), who had become unpopular amid an economic downturn. There were no primary elections to select a party nominee, and Cleveland was well known and well liked by leading Democrats.

That brings us toTheodore Roosevelt, who had become president in 1901 after William McKinley's assassination and was then elected in his own right in 1904.After leaving office in 1909, replaced byhishandpicked successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt became dissatisfied with Taft's leadership and the Republican Party's direction. He first tried to wrest the Republicannomination away from Taftin 1912, and when that failed, wound up runningas the nomineeof the Progressive Party. Roosevelt didn't win the election but outperformed Taft in both popular and electoral votes his 27 percent share of the popular vote remains the largest proportion won byany third party candidate ever and for better or worse was instrumental in the election of Woodrow Wilson.

That was the last serious campaign mounted by a former president, nearly 110 years ago. The gradual emergence of the primary system probably has something to do with that, as doesthegrowing cynicism amongAmericans about politicians perceived as "losers." Otherformer presidents, including Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford, have considered running again, but nonehas actually done so.

Until, perhaps DonaldTrump.

No previous ex-presidentwas anything likeTrump, as is blatantly obvious.Of course they were ambitious,but none of them tried to arguethat the presidency was his God-given right. None urged the kinds of party purges that Trump and his crew are leading against "disloyal" Republicans like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. None of them flat-out lied about the reason why they'd lost power or urged anti-democratic means in order to reclaim it.

Right now Republicans across the country are pouring millionsintovoting restrictions, clearly targeting Democratic voters, primarily people of color. They hope to win elections simply by preventing certain voters from exercising their constitutional rights. Even if this gambit fails in the near term, Republicans have laid the foundations for overturning unfavorable outcomes.They can simply appoint loyal Trumpers or GOP partisan to the right positions to ensure that they can win even if they lose, and then create another Big Lie to justify their behavior.

It is entirely conceivable that Trump could becomethe first ex-president since Cleveland to be elected to another term, given the potential effects of thesevoter suppression laws and the ardor of his supporters. Whether we will still have anything left that could be called a democracy, if that happens, is anyone's guess.

Read more here:

Trump wouldn't be the first ex-president to run again but he might be the last - Salon

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Trump wouldn’t be the first ex-president to run again but he might be the last – Salon

Republicans cry big tech bias on the very platforms they have dominated – The Guardian

Posted: at 11:33 am

When Donald Trumps ban from Facebook was upheld this week, the howls of bias could be heard from Republicans far and wide. Those shrieks, ironically, came mostly on social media.

Republicans have spent recent years criticizing Facebook and Twitter, demonizing them as biased against the right. But they, not Democrats, have been the most enthusiastic embracers of social media, and the most successful in harnessing its potential.

Between 1 January and 15 December last year, right-leaning Facebook pages accounted for 45% of all interactions on Facebook, according to a study by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit which monitors US media.

Rightwing pages earned nearly 9bn likes or comments, MMFA found, compared to 5bn interactions on left-leaning pages. Conservative pages account for six of the top 10 Facebook pages that post about US political news.

The years-long dominance on Facebook has translated to notable successes most memorably in 2016, when Donald Trumps win was propelled by his social media reach. Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing, Brad Parscale, the digital director of the 2016 Trump campaign, said in the aftermath of the election.

Twitter for Mr Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.

Those successes appeared to have been forgotten in the last week, when prominent Republicans, including Texas senator Ted Cruz and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, condemned Facebook in particular. The platform angered the right with its decision to uphold Trumps post-insurrection suspension, even though a long-term decision has been punted down the road.

If the big tech oligarchs can muzzle the former president, whats to stop them from silencing you? Cruz said.

If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next. A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech, was McCarthys take.

Cruz and other Republicans have been accusing Facebook of bias for years even as the platform was propelling Trump to victory, while being criticized on the left for being slow to remove rightwing lies or conspiracy theories.

Because Republicans have such a disproportionate amount of influence on these platforms and engagement, the real effect is that by constantly crying bias, it works the refs in such that they dont enforce the rules against them in a consistent way, Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA, said.

Or theyre less likely to take action against cheaters and bad actors, because they dont want to deal with the blowback of what happens when I take off one of these accounts.

Carusone pointed to how Facebook dealt with groups promoting QAnon, a conspiracy movement that alleges a group of global elites are involved in paedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children. It took until October last year for the network to finally ban groups, pages or Instagram pages which represent QAnon, despite the theory having been promulgated for years.

Joe Romm, author of How To Go Viral and Reach Millions and editor-in-chief of Front Page Live, a news site dedicated to elevating fact-based stories said that for Republicans, claiming that they are oppressed by media is a consistent narrative.

Its part of the overall strategy of playing the victim, Romm said. Donald Trump showed that its part of the overall strategy of: accuse your opponents of doing what youre doing before they can accuse you.

And so it just makes it so much harder, because if you accuse them first, then when progressives then accurately say: Oh, were being disadvantaged on social media, no one is going to believe it, because they bought into this big lie that the conservatives are being punished on social media.

As Republicans have cried foul, several rightwing politicians have even written books about such perceived bias the most recent by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a millionaire Yale law school graduate turned earthy, blue collar, man of the people.

Hawley wrote The Tyranny of Big Tech after claiming he had been censored and canceled by social media. The hypocrisy of the books claim that big tech is suppressing conservative thought was exposed by Hawley himself this week, however, when he used Twitter, one of the companies he rails against, to giddily proclaim that his book had been a bestseller all week on Amazon another company he opposes.

The claims of conservative bias are only like to continue as the 2022 midterms approach, but experts sayany bias is actually against the other side.

I would say that, in fact, big tech right now is biased against liberals the thumb is on the scale for those who put out the rightwing lies, Romm said.

The thing that the social media apps want to do is keep you on their site. Thats what they care about. They dont care about the truth, they care about keeping you on their site.

So the way things are set up, if you can stir up anger, and get people to comment, and engage and send out shares and say: This is outrageous, then youve got a big advantage in the algorithm. So what the social media sites have done is create a system that favors the most outrageous statements.

Ironically, some of those most outrageous statements are set to come against the leaders of the Republican party railing against the social media giants.

I think the right will leverage this moment to make big tech the new Hillary, Carusone said. And thats going to be a galvanizing force for them leading into 2022 and then again in 2024.

Read more from the original source:

Republicans cry big tech bias on the very platforms they have dominated - The Guardian

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Republicans cry big tech bias on the very platforms they have dominated – The Guardian

Letters to the editor: Doctor against medical marijuana; readers address Donald Trump’s lie, Medicaid expansion – The Topeka Capital-Journal

Posted: at 11:33 am

News media is failing usonmedical marijuana

It is extremely concerning to me that our local media is just blindly accepting the medical marijuana legislation instead of questioning very serious elements.

Why are we allowing the legislature to bypass the FDA for approving medication? All other medications have been required to go through the FDA approval processes

Why are we allowing the use of marijuana for illnesses or conditions that have zero or little research science behind them?

Why are we willing to accept an extremely high dose level of THC that has been clearly demonstrated to cause episodes of psychosis?

How are we going to deal with patients that want to smoke pot while they are hospitalized for other conditions. Will hospitals be required to carry marijuana?

Will malpractice lawsuits increase because of serious side effects from marijuana recommendations?

Why are we not hearing about all of the negative experiences from other states that have succumbed to medical marijuana. There is tremendous evidence that allowing medical marijuana was a mistake.

News media needs to be asking these questions and pushing back on a dangerous and potentially harmful legislative action.

Eric Voth, M.D., Topeka

A vote for a Republican now means a vote to nullify free speech, a vote to accept truth as that which Donald J. Trump says is truth. The Republican Party no longer allows dissent. If the Republican Party again becomes the majority party, the right to freedom of speech for all of Americas citizens could end.

The Republican Party has long been a home for those who are conservative in ideology. Today, it is a party that has no ideology. It had no platform. It is the party of whatever Trump wants it to be. If he proclaimed the sky to be orange with purple stripes, the Republican Party would oust those Republicans who would insist that the sky is blue & sometimes gray. An orange sky with purple stripes would be the new truth.

Those who claim a Trump win last November are either lying or delusional or, worst of all, standing silent to protect their own already tainted political futures. To minimize the Capital insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, is to minimize or even deny our democratic roots.

Scary stuff.

Terry Larson, Topeka

Medicaid expansion is one of the most critical steps our lawmakers can take right now to help fight cancer.

More than 165,000 Kansans are in the Medicaid coverage gap they earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid program but not enough to receive subsidies for insurance on the federal marketplace. By increasing the income eligibility for Medicaid, these hard-working Kansans can finally gain access to affordable, comprehensive coverage.

Medicaid expansion has been proven to increase access to preventive health care like cancer screenings. That means cancer can be caught and treated earlier, leading to better outcomes for patients. In short, we can save lives with Medicaid expansion.

Kansans overwhelmingly support Medicaid expansion and all our neighboring states have chosen to expand their Medicaid programs. Now is the time for the Kansas Legislature to do the right thing and expand the Medicaid program so that more Kansans can lead healthier lives.

As the child of someone who lost their fight with cancer, I know that cancer doesnt wait. And I encourage our lawmakers to not wait either.

Alexandra Williamson (American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteer),Topeka

See more here:

Letters to the editor: Doctor against medical marijuana; readers address Donald Trump's lie, Medicaid expansion - The Topeka Capital-Journal

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off on Letters to the editor: Doctor against medical marijuana; readers address Donald Trump’s lie, Medicaid expansion – The Topeka Capital-Journal

A last waltz for Yahoo and AOL, and Elon’s crypto comedy show – Business Insider

Posted: at 11:31 am

Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the Insider Tech newsletter, where we break down the biggest news in tech, including:

Soundtrack: This week's newsletter has been specially designed to be consumed while listening to Serge Gainsbourg's "Requiem pour un con"

With all the big news this past week about Donald Trump's Facebook account, Apple's courtroom battle with Epic, and the Bill and Melinda breakup, you might have missed another important development in tech: the sale of Yahoo and AOL.

Iconic is an apt description for both Yahoo and AOL. The companies helped create the internet as we know it today, with decades-long histories that have spanned the administrations of about a half dozen US presidents and just as many transitions of technology standards. (Remember the ubiquitous 3.5 inch AOL floppy discs?)

As Insider columnist Adam Lashinsky writes, the slow decline that befell both companies is the result of a long list of causes. Yahoo's fall from grace is particularly instructive when you consider all the trends the company recognized early on but never capitalized on, allowing other companies to steal the show. Lashinsky writes:

"It bought a Web 1.0 company called GeoCitiesthat could have been the next MySpace or Facebook but wasn't. The same goes for Flickr, the preeminent photo-sharing site of its day later outshone by Instagram. It even beat Google to the punch byacquiring the original search-based ad auction company, Overture, only to be overwhelmed by its competitor."

Elon Musk, the self-declared Imperator of Mars, is due to host comedy show "Saturday Night Live" this weekend, a must-see TV event that has apparently, and fittingly, fueled a surge in the price of dogecoin a cryptocurrency that was created as a joke.

As Insider's Margaux MacColl reports, the venture capital world is getting serious about the crypto boom, especially with the news that Andreessen Horowitz is launching a $1 billion crypto fund.

Of course, there's a risk that blockchain tech could obviate the need for VCs altogether. Instead of giving away equity in their company in exchange for a venture firm check, a crypto startup could simply issue its own currency through an "initial coin offering" and raise capital all by itself.

Now that's a crypto joke that VCs might not find very funny.

See also: Elon Musk is pumping stocks, cryptocurrencies, and the energy of 49 million loyal followers to dizzying heights. Experts break down the risks of his incessant tweets, from legal trouble to losses for small investors.

It looks like something from a new action movie, but there are no special effects in this video of Britain's Royal Marines training with a jet pack.

The "Jet Suit" made by the UK's Gravity Industries is still experimental and the British military has not committed to buying the technology. But the video, based on three days of training drills conducted by 42 Royal Marines, offers a fascinating glimpse of how jet packs could be used for military operations.

In the video, a Jet Suit-equipped Royal Marine blasts off an inflatable raft and lands on the deck of a nearby ship. He then throws down a rope ladder to let fellow soldiers board the vessel, part of a maritime operation known as "visit, board, search and seizure." Trust me, you'll want to watch this video.

Google's new security default for all users is part of its path to eliminating passwords entirely, according to a product exec

Leaked financials: Sequoia-backed grocery delivery unicorn Getir is in talks to raise a pre-IPO round at a $7 billion valuation

Melinda French Gates has an investment firm called Pivotal Ventures that is a quiet powerhouse in the venture industry.

Peloton just recalled its treadmill, but customers reported injuries and safety concerns as early as January 2019

5 top VCs reveal the favorite cybersecurity startups in their portfolios, after investors pumped a record $7.8 billion into the industry last year

Meet Elizabeth Yin, the VC reforming the industry by openly sharing what may be some of venture's ugliest secrets

The wealthy invested in 'hidden gem' locations during the pandemic, propelling property prices in smaller cities to new heights

Thanks for reading, and if you like this newsletter,tell your friends and colleagues they can sign up here to receive it.

Alexei

Follow this link:

A last waltz for Yahoo and AOL, and Elon's crypto comedy show - Business Insider

Posted in Yahoo | Comments Off on A last waltz for Yahoo and AOL, and Elon’s crypto comedy show – Business Insider

Yahoo Answers is dead, but its weird and amusing legacy lives on – CNET

Posted: at 11:31 am

Angela Lang/CNET

It's over. On May 4, Yahoo Answers went offline, putting an end to one of the weirdest, oldest and least organized communities of crowdsourced questions and answers. The site's seemingly endless parade of user-submitted queries ranged from intriguing thought experiments (from the likes of Stephen Hawking, no less) to the absurdity of someone asking the community, "What did my dad just say to me?"

Why do you think anybody on the internet would know this?

Yahoo Answers became notorious as a home for a very specific brand of chaos. Some questions became famous memes unto themselves. Others became standards on "top ten funniest" Yahoo Answers questions. The community became a rich mine of material for YouTube comedians, even PewDiePie. Famous podcasters used Yahoo Answers as a source for inspiration too: Dissecting weird questions was a regular segment on My Brother, My Brother and Me.

Yahoo Answers had a legacy. Just not the one it was designed to have.

Entertain your brain with the coolest news from streaming to superheroes, memes to video games.

When Yahoo launched its question-and-answer platform in 2005, becoming a mainstay of internet comedy wasn't part of the plan. The company billed the service as "a place where people can ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions and personal experiences." Even so, Yahoo Answers didn't exist for its own sake -- it was created to help bolster Yahoo Search results.

It can be easy to forget how influential Yahoo once was. It was a big company with social communities, email, directories and, of course, the biggest search engine in the world. In 2005, however it was facing fierce competition. The hope was that Yahoo Answers could make the company's search engine better by offering users millions of crowdsourced answers to any question they might have.

A tech support classic.

"Long term, Answers has the potential to attract incremental users, increase time spent on the Yahoo! Platform," Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth told Forbes shortly after the service launched, "and create monetization opportunities through additional sponsored links and page views."

Yahoo Answers was never really about the answers, which could be why the service was best known for the questions its users asked.

Regardless of what Yahoo Answers was designed to be, it's best known for the surprising and ridiculous questions people asked it. In fact, before news broke of the shutdown, most searches for Yahoo Answers on Google, YouTube and other platforms brought back lists of absurd and amusing ponderings.

There are dozens of comedy videos mocking Yahoo Answers' weirdest questions, and teasing these often too-personal questions will forever be a part of the service's legacy. Despite the jokes, the platform actually got kind of close to what it was designed to be. More earnest searches could lead you to awkward, but innocent questions about growing up and human development -- possibly the queries of those too embarrassed to ask their parents. Lots of users were seeking household repair tips and tech support.

Some questions were just students trying to get the internet to "help" with their homework.

When you really didn't feel like doing your own homework, Yahoo Answers was there.

Although the platform was devised to augment Yahoo's search engine, the site's features helped it find its own weird identity once that searchable trove of knowledge became less of a priority for the company. Question askers could pick the best response to any given question, which would help the person writing that answer earn points to level up in an internal ranking system. The points and level didn't actually do anything, but it helped create a sense of community.

That sense of community is one of the things that made Yahoo Answers interesting. When it launched in late 2005, it debuted alongside many of today's internet giants. Facebook and Reddit were both still in their infancy, and Twitter was only months away. Yahoo Answers wasn't built to compete with any of these networks, but it filled some similar roles. At a time when users online were moving away from traditional message board systems and chat rooms, Yahoo Answers was there -- serving as a half-step between the internet communities of the late 1990s and the social media empires that were about to take over the web.

Some Yahoo Answers users were just trying to learn about growing up.

It's one aspect of the service that survived to the end. Browsing Yahoo Answers' categories in its final days still surfaced plenty of standard questions seeking answers ("Can u write on money," or "How do I get a grease stain out of concrete"), but you could also find the same discussions you'd expect on Reddit. These range from new parents asking in the parenting forum what people thought of the name of their child, or political partisans debating the latest headlines in the politics and news sections.

After May 4, the Yahoo question-and-answer service will go the way of GeoCities. There'll be no official attempts to preserve or archive the service. Unless an outside group takes action, Yahoo Answers' millions of questions -- chaotic, hilarious and sublime -- will be lost to time.

Fortunately, this is the internet, where there's always someone happy to preserve a bizarre database of terrible spelling and weird questions -- even if it might not be worth saving. When Yahoo announced it was shutting the service down, Gizmodo wrote that it created a script that would archive 84 million Yahoo Answers questions to the Internet Archive, but admitted that it would take two years to complete the process. Fortunately, a group called Archive Team started a similar project back in 2016.

A large portion of Yahoo Answers' publicly available questions are already backed up, and the team has made archiving the rest their "warrior project" focus for spring 2021. For better or worse, Yahoo Answers' weird legacy will be preserved on the Internet Archive.

Unfortunately, the archived pages' search function doesn't currently work, but at least we'll always have all those MBMBAM segments.

See the original post here:

Yahoo Answers is dead, but its weird and amusing legacy lives on - CNET

Posted in Yahoo | Comments Off on Yahoo Answers is dead, but its weird and amusing legacy lives on – CNET

Remembering the lives lost to COVID-19: James Luensman, 43, of Atkins, Iowa – Yahoo News

Posted: at 11:31 am

The New York Times

Democrats are struggling to build a surefire legal strategy to block new Republican-backed restrictions on voting rights, relying on broadly worded warnings and urgent pleas that are designed, in part, to build political pressure on the White House, Congress and the Justice Department to act, as well as to engage their supporters to mobilize in advance of the 2022 midterm elections. The approach is aimed at persuading recalcitrant Senate Democrats in Washington to pass a sweeping federal elections bill, painting the new Republican laws in the news media as suspect on arrival, and convincing the swing voters who last year helped elect President Joe Biden that the GOP is more interested in fixing elections for itself than in winning those voters back. Locked out of power in the Republican-run states that are enacting laws making it harder to vote, Democrats are engaged in a partywide effort to push back against the legislation that has as much to do with winning hearts and minds outside courtrooms as it does legal victories inside them. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Were taking an all-of-the-above approach because we cant allow these things to stand, Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview Friday. As Democrats, we have to make this personal and we have to tell the story as to why this is important. This is fundamental. The most fundamental thing we have to do is protect the right of all folks to vote. Republican laws passed in Georgia and Florida, along with a bill advancing in Texas, have so many new provisions that Democrats find troublesome both politically and legally that it is proving overwhelming to confront the measures one by one in court. Instead, the liberal push has become more focused on political outreach to ensure that progressive voters are sufficiently outraged about the new laws to apply pressure on senators and get out the vote next year. No one is going to file a 2,000-page brief, said Myrna Prez, the director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. The energy spent educating voters about whats going on, and then energy spent trying to stop it, is consuming resources from the bread-and-butter work that groups like mine do. Many of the voting bills have been able to sail through Republican-controlled legislatures because the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, which hollowed out the preclearance provision that required certain states, mostly in the South, to gain federal approval before making changes to voting laws. With the Voting Rights Act now far weaker, voting rights activists say that litigation is often the only way to fight new restrictions, and an imperfect one at that. Case-by-case litigation in the voting context is time-consuming, costly and ultimately inadequate because even if you win a case, frequently these kinds of laws remain on the books for one or more election cycle before litigation can be complete, and theres no way to compensate people after the fact, said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which litigated several major cases last year. Beyond lawsuits, Democrats are grappling with the long-term question of how to make crucial gains in GOP-led legislatures where state demographics, years of gerrymandering and the prospect of Republicans mapping themselves into another decade of control when redistricting takes place later this year have given conservatives a nearly unbreakable grip on power. In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the states new voting law Thursday, Democrats are reckoning with decades of party disinvestment in down-ballot elections and issuing dire warnings that nothing will improve without wholesale changes in how the party invests in local contests. Raymond Paultre, the executive director of the Florida Alliance, an often secretive network of progressive donors that has in the past been at odds with the Florida Democratic Party, said Friday that the new laws in Georgia and Florida and the bill advanced by Texas Republicans illustrated the need for more resources to be directed to state legislative races. We are living in and through sort of the remnants and results of a lack of investments in state infrastructure for the last 30 years, Paultre said. We dont have a clear way of stopping these bills. Lets use this as a wake-up call. Lets get as upset with ourselves as we are with the Republicans. At the same time, Florida Democrats are already envisioning how they will use the new law as part of their campaigns in the midterm elections to paint Republicans as being opposed to Black and Hispanic peoples right to vote. People want us to push back, said Fentrice Driskell, a state representative from Tampa. We recognize that the 22 election cycle will be a great opportunity to try and do that. Democrats legal case against the Florida law, filed by the partys top election lawyer, Marc Elias, argues that the legislation violates the First Amendments protection of free speech, and the 14th Amendment on the grounds that it would adversely affect people of color. Another suit, filed Thursday by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also argues that the law violates the First and 14th Amendments, as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act because many drop boxes are likely to be moved to indoor locations that are inaccessible to people with disabilities. Sam Spital, the director of litigation for the legal defense fund, said that while he believed the lawsuits would prevail, the only comprehensive solution to Republican efforts to restrict voting would come from the federal government both Congress and the Justice Department. It is incumbent upon Congress to exercise its authority to make sure that were not going to have this kind of voter suppression, he said. Elias said he was seeking to make the legal case that the Florida law violates First Amendment free speech rights because it restricts what voters can be told when they register to vote. The 14th Amendment argument is that the law violates Supreme Court doctrine known as the Anderson-Burdick test, which requires courts to balance new burdens on voters against the benefits that the state claims are being added to its voting system. Elias makes his legal case daily on Twitter, where he promotes his Democracy Docket website and, on Friday afternoon, hosted a 40-minute live chat on Twitter Spaces, the sites live audio chat feature, in which he explained civil rights and election laws to about 170 people who tuned in. The numerous lawsuits from Elias and others have not rattled the Republican National Committees legal team, which views them as an effort to drum up outrage as much as a legal challenge. And, they argue, the lawsuits will be very hard to win. The state is going to need to basically provide a justification that outweighs any potential burden on the right to vote, said Justin Riemer, the chief counsel for the RNC. And the fact of the matter is, the Democrats will be unable to provide evidence that shows that these laws actually impair voting rights and make it harder to vote. Instead, Riemer saw the lawsuits as an attempt to force Democrats in Washington to act. Theyre trying to have Congress solve the problem for them by actually imposing a new legal standard for bringing these claims, Riemer said. In Texas, late amendments and procedural moves were still unable to halt the Republican bill from being passed at 3 a.m. Friday. The bill, which became slightly less restrictive after the late-night adjustments, still greatly empowers partisan poll watchers, bars election officials from proactively mailing out absentee ballots, and sets strict punishments for election officials who run afoul of regulations while helping voters who require assistance. Hours after the bill passed, Democrats in Texas looked to Congress for help. Democrats will continue to work together to quickly pass federal legislation that ensures the rights of the people to vote are protected in all 50 states, said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. In the hours between DeSantis signing of the Florida law and Texas House Republicans passing their voting bill early Friday, progressive groups spoke out about their desire for Congress to pass Democrats big election bills, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The For the People Act, which is far broader, would mandate national automatic voter registration and no-excuse early voting and mail-in voting; neuter restrictive state voter identification laws; and create independent redistricting commissions for congressional districts and new dark-money transparency measures. The John Lewis act would reinstitute the federal preclearance requirement for changing election laws. The For the People Act has passed the House and remains stalled in the Senate, where Democrats lack both 60 votes to avoid a filibuster and an agreement among themselves over whether the legislation can proceed with a simple majority vote. The John Lewis bill has not yet passed the House. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., chairman of the partys Democracy Reform task force, said Friday that congressional Democrats voting legislation, if enacted, would carry more weight than any court victory could. There will be court decisions and challenges in the future, he said, but what were really trying to do is reset the table on what our democracy looks like. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company

More here:

Remembering the lives lost to COVID-19: James Luensman, 43, of Atkins, Iowa - Yahoo News

Posted in Yahoo | Comments Off on Remembering the lives lost to COVID-19: James Luensman, 43, of Atkins, Iowa – Yahoo News

Elizabeth Warren: ‘There’s a real issue’ with environmental impact of bitcoin – Yahoo Finance

Posted: at 11:31 am

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has questions about cryptocurrency, including whether it takes advantage of smaller investors. The progressive senator also wonders whether bitcoin is too easy to steal.

The former presidential candidate has been pushing for government intervention on both of those fronts and, in a conversation with Yahoo Finance's editor-in-chief, Andy Serwer, this week, she raised another growing concern: the impact on the planet that has come with the rapid growth of cryptocurrency.

I also think with bitcoin, and with the other cryptocurrencies, I think there's a real issue about the environmental impact as well, this whole notion of how much energy is consumed just to keep the currency tracking going, said Warren, who's out with a new book, "Persist," which is billed as both a personal narrative and a call for "political transformation."

Compared to traditional currency, bitcoin has a relatively large carbon footprint because new bitcoin has to be "mined." Bitcoin "miners" receive bitcoin as a reward for verifying and recording transactions that require massive amounts of computing power which takes massive amounts of real life power.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) questions Xavier Becerra, nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, during his Senate Finance Committee nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, U.S., February 24, 2021. Greg Nash/Pool via REUTERS

Crypto miners' energy needs have already disrupted the grid of an entire town, and consumption grows the more popular these currencies become.

You don't consume that kind of energy, in order to have money on deposit at a bank or a mutual fund, Warren told Yahoo Finance. In that sense, bitcoin is very different and in a 21st century, we're becoming a lot more sensitive to the worldwide impacts of the choices we make.

Warren spoke to Serwer in an episode of Influencers with Andy Serwer, a weekly interview series with leaders in business, politics, and entertainment.

There have been different efforts to measure the environmental impacts of bitcoin. The electricity used to mine bitcoin each year exceeds the individual annual electricity consumption of Ukraine, Sweden, or Argentina, according to an ongoing study from the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School.

Story continues

Warren is far from alone in expressing concerns over bitcoin. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has worked to fund efforts at combating climate change, has also raised the alarm over the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, and so its not a great climate thing," Gates told Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times in February.

It's unclear whether governments around the world will enact regulations to mitigate these impacts, but the industry has taken some steps to regulate itself. In April, energy, cryptocurrency, and fintech leaders signed onto a "Crypto Climate Accord" seeking to have all of the world's blockchains powered by 100% renewables within four years. Meanwhile, payments company Square (SQ) has responded to the increasing public pressure by pledging to support greener bitcoin mining practices and to become a zero-net carbon contributor by 2030.

Still, even if bitcoin's environmental impacts are reduced, Warren will likely continue to have questions about the cryptocurrency. As she told CNBC in March, agreeing with a sentiment expressed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, "It's speculative in nature and going to end badly."

Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.

Elizabeth Warren responds to Biden's backing of COVID-19 vaccine patent waivers: 'I'm delighted'

Facebook board's Trump decision shows Big Tech is 'way too powerful': Elizabeth Warren

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.

Read more here:

Elizabeth Warren: 'There's a real issue' with environmental impact of bitcoin - Yahoo Finance

Posted in Yahoo | Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren: ‘There’s a real issue’ with environmental impact of bitcoin – Yahoo Finance