All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[Tami]

Facebook to rename Instagram and WhatsApp because it DGAF

Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, and Mark Zuckerberg is apparently goddamn sick of having to remind people of that fact.

According to The Information, Facebook is set to change the names of Instagram and WhatsApp to better reflect their second-tier status and better credit Facebook for the apps' growth. And just what, exactly, will the new names be?

Say hello to "Instagram from Facebook," and "WhatsApp from Facebook."

Which: LOL.

[numberthirty]

It's become painfully clear you are doing the very thing I take issue with "I think X and there is a massive amount of untapped voters just like me so that's why the Democrats should think X too". You have absolutely no evidence to support that. It's you selfishly projecting your ideology on the electorate and then throwing out garbage arguments like your Joe Manchin one thinking it's true. It's not true. It's a fairy tale you tell yourself.

They didn't pour out for Stacey Abrams or Andrew Gillum or a host of other progressives. Why? Because they're as real as unicorns. Stop projecting and move the conversation left with your vote.

And, most of all, stop trashing centrist wins over Republicans because you really like pretending you have a unicorn.

- https://time.com/5641038/democratic-...-flint-voters/

Amber Hassan, a 38-year old Flint hip-hop artist, said she wasn’t particularly impressed with any of the front-runners on Wednesday night. “I’m waiting for Kamala Harris to represent everyday black women,” she said, “I’m not talking about PhD black women, I’m talking about everyday, middle America, regular struggles black women.”

Biden, she added, “feels entitled to it, there’s an air of ‘I’ve kind of got this in the bag, I’ve done this before,'” she said. “No, you haven’t done this before: you’ve been the assistant.” Booker, she said, didn’t seem “authentic.”

Overall, these voters responded best when the candidates involved the challenges facing their community in Flint. They nodded when Booker argued that Trump won Michigan partly because of the suppression of black voters. They cheered when Yang pointed out that “we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs, hundreds of thousands right here in Michigan.” They clapped when Gabbard suggested redirecting trillions of dollars away from “wasteful regime change wars” and towards “making sure everyone in this country has clean water to drink.”

Smith came to the debate thinking he wanted to hear from Harris or Booker, but found herself listening closely to Yang. “He was really talking about real issues, not just attacking and playing the politics game. He had his math together,” said Smith. “He’s not the usual candidate.” Other voters at the watch party agreed: in an informal poll conducted after the debate, Yang won overwhelmingly.

Some voters said that if nobody captures their trust, they may not vote at all. Amber Hassan, who calls herself a “selective voter,” says choosing between two imperfect candidates is like choosing between “dirty lettuce or rotten lettuce,” and she’d rather walk away with nothing.

“We’ve been lied to so many times,” says Lendra Brown, 59, a former food stamp manager. If she had to vote tomorrow, she says, “I would vote for Mickey Mouse.”

If you want to look at this and say "No Evidence..."? Your call.

Meanwhile, folks are trying to tell you something.

[Tendrin]

Oh... oh no...

Anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer launched a congressional bid on Friday, setting herself up for almost certain defeat in a heavily Democratic House district.

Loomer registered to run as a Republican against Rep. Lois Frankel (D) in Florida’s 21st Congressional District, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission.

I'm sorry, WBE, But now you have to profile her

[numberthirty]

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ndraising.html

Detailed Maps of the Donors Powering the 2020 Democratic Campaigns

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a huge lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in the number of individual donors they have each accumulated so far.

This is the first time since the primary race began in earnest that we can estimate how many individual donors each candidate has attracted — a key indicator of how much they are catching on with voters.

Mr. Sanders is relying heavily on small donors to power his campaign, and he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors who supported his 2016 presidential bid. The map above shows the breadth of Mr. Sanders’s roster of donors across the United States.

A map that includes the rest of the Democratic field without Mr. Sanders offers a picture of where the other major candidates are picking up donors. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the other leading progressive in the race, is outpacing the rest of the field across much of the country — a sign that her strategy of relying on grass-roots donors, and refraining from holding high-dollar fund-raisers, is working.

But, yeah...

There is obviously nothing that points to that there are probably untapped progressive-minded voters out there that could deliver an election.

[worstblogever]

Oh... oh no...



I'm sorry, WBE, But now you have to profile her

...

...

I mean, I think we're well past the "both sides are just as bad" point now. Republicans aren't becoming the party of the deranged conspiracy theorists and/or white nationalists... it's just who they are now. Much as the one long-time on this forum would like to deny that fact. This isn't a series of one-offs... the fringe is your party's core.

[Tendrin]

The rare double set of ellipses response.

Don't forget to include the time she handcuffed herself to twitter hq's doors!

[worstblogever]

The rare double set of ellipses response.

Don't forget to include the time she handcuffed herself to twitter hq's doors!

And they left her there.

[Tendrin]

And they left her there.

That was the best part.

I also am very annoyed they called her an 'anti-Muslim activist'. Would you call the KKK 'anti-black activists'? No? Then don't call a bigot anything but a frigging bigot. And Loomer is a bigot. :P

[numberthirty]

From the "Illinois" corner...

While I'm not usually one to feel one way or another about these sorts of things when they are in the "Talking About It..." stage, I did get my hopes up just a little bit about this one.

- https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/20...uth-west-sides

Lightfoot vows changes in targeted ‘high-priority commercial corridors’ will be ‘transformative — not transactional’

Last month, Mayor Lori Lightfoot wrapped up a listening tour of Chicago neighborhoods by promising “transformative” investments in long-neglected South and West Side neighborhoods.

She reiterated that promise earlier this week after a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago race riots, a “bitter and shameful chapter” that, she claimed, represents not only Chicago’s past, but its present.

Now, Lightfoot is putting some more meat on the bone — by promising to launch her “Marshall Plan” by investing heavily over the next two years in, what she called “high-priority commercial corridors.”

The mayor didn’t disclose the corridors in her speech at the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Signature Breakfast. That will happen in the coming weeks, she said.

But the commercial strips already have been identified by her staff — working hand-in-glove with community groups — as “prime corridors for development due to available retail, a concentration of existing businesses, vehicular traffic, high public transit ridership, commercial zoning and existing business licenses.”

[Malvolio]

It IS frightening, especially when you consider that Teddy might be the greatest peacetime president the country ever had (even if he was one of the absolute worst ex-presidents), and adding in that all 3 of the 'before-Barry' presidents on the list were willing to take on (or at least warn against) the power of big business, makes one wonder exactly how they transformed so completely into what the party was originally fighting against.

They did it quietly by way of guys like the three Republican Presidents in between Taft and Ike: Warren "Teapot Dome" Harding, Calvin "The Business of America is Business" Coolidge and Herbert "Let the Great Depression Happen" Hoover.

[Tami]

Rep. Cheney Accuses Tribes of “Destroying our Western Way of Life” Over Sacred Grizzly Protections

RIVERTON, Wyo. — On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”

One of the largest tribal-plaintiff alliances in recent memory prevailed in the landmark case, Crow Tribe et al v. Zinke last September, when US District Judge Dana Christensen ruled in favor of the tribes and environmental groups after finding that the Trump Administration’s US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) had failed to abide by the ESA and exceeded its authority in attempting to remove federal protections from the grizzly. Tuesday, USFWS officially returned federal protections to the grizzly.

“So, in striving to protect our culture, our religious and spiritual freedoms, our sovereignty and our treaty rights – all of which are encapsulated in the grizzly issue – we are ‘destroying’ Cheney’s idea of the ‘Western way of life’?” questioned Rodgers. “I would remind the Congresswoman that at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition an estimated 100,000 grizzly bears roamed from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. That was all Indian Country. Now there are fewer than 2,000 grizzly bears and our people live in Third World conditions on meager reservations in the poorest counties in the US. Does she really want to talk about ‘destroying’ a ‘way of life’?” asked Rodgers.

[Tuck]

They did it quietly by way of guys like the three Republican Presidents in between Taft and Ike: Warren "Teapot Dome" Harding, Calvin "The Business of America is Business" Coolidge and Herbert "Let the Great Depression Happen" Hoover.

I don't know about giving Taft the credit he's getting in this discussion. As Chief Justice, he oversaw one of the most conservative, anti-regulatory Courts in US history.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars since Empire.

The original is and always was the best Star Wars and Empire is overrated and got it's nerd cred for that scene in Clerks

[JCAll]

The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars since Empire.

Oh no, you better not be talking smack about my boy, The Phantom Menace

[Kusanagi]

The original is and always was the best Star Wars and Empire is overrated and got it's nerd cred for that scene in Clerks

Star Wars as a whole is overrated, but Empire and Rogue One are good.