All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[numberthirty]

Another one from the "I'm Probably Not 'Attacking' Your 'Business As Usual...' Democrats. They Actually Are Just Lousy..." files...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/polit...344-story.html

On Chicago’s South Side, the sincerity of Pete Buttigieg’s quest to gain support for his Democratic presidential bid from African Americans gets questioned

Howard Roberson, director of sales and print production for EF Design Group, a black-owned design and print shop in Brighton Park, pointed to Buttigieg’s visit to Bronzeville in August and a discussion he said he’d had with his campaign team.

“My company is African American union printers and we spoke with your team about trying to work with you and your team. We exchanged information but in six months we haven’t gotten one quote, one email answered,” Roberson told Buttigieg.

“You talk very passionately about economic development and that we’re the proud black people. Does that reflect in your campaign or is that just a speech?” Roberson asked.

Buttigieg responded that for his campaign team and its vendors, minority inclusion is important “to make sure that we practice what we preach.” Saying he was unaware of the specifics involving the print shop, he said he wanted to get information about the business afterward.

But Roberson sounded unsatisfied with Buttigieg’s answer.

“I say if the campaign doesn’t reflect what he’s doing, then how is his national agenda going to reflect the inclusion?” Roberson told the Tribune. “So, if you can’t include (minority inclusion) in your campaign, how are you going to do it on the national level?”

[numberthirty]

Since someone mentioned wanting some "News" stories along with the "Politics" recently...

https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/202...ity-store.html

Man returns $43K he found hidden in couch bought at Habitat for Humanity store

[Tendrin]

The House released a bundle of new Parnas documents this evening. I’ve been working my way through them at home. The most interesting to me are copies of exchanges between Robert Hyde — the landscaper from Connecticut — and an unidentified man in Belgium, or at least texting from a Belgian country code cell number.


A lot of those reports from Hyde to Parnas, allegedly about Yovanovitch’s whereabouts and actions, seemed to come from this guy in Belgium. In many cases, Hyde was apparently just copying and pasting what the guy in Belgium was telling him. The whole thing was very hard to make sense of, both logically and in terms of making sense of what was even contained in the documents released from the House. Was an image of a text exchange or a screen capture of one text exchange passed on in a separate text exchange? In any case NBC just published a report that clarifies a lot of this. It’s very weird and very dark. I just recommend reading the NBC report.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog...-a-lot-weirder

I do not envy WBE.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Moderates acting like they care about women and pretending like progressives are the sexist ones is just desperate and isn't fooling anyone. Because we really just all need to suck it up and get Biden elected and then the world will go back to exactly as it was in 2016, when women had no problems to deal with whatsoever. And of course we need to support putting more women in positions of power no matter what, especially ones that start taking right wing stances on everything in the name of looking tough, because actually trying to help people makes you weak apparently.

I mean this is the same thread that also pretends that the second most popular candidate with African Americans is also problematic and opposed to them so let's be real. The mindset you are referring to is how you get old white guys who support Biden shaming women of color like AOC for supporting someone she is ideologically aligned to over someone she is the antithesis of.

It's just a self serving narrative to be a booster for whoever you like and against who you dislike.

[Tami]

NEWS: I just received a shocking declassified FBI memo confirming that the Saudi government has been helping fugitives flee the U.S. justice system after being accused or convicted of violent crimes.

Twitter Link from Senator Wyden

FBI: Saudi government ‘almost certainly’ helps its citizens escape prosecution in US for serious crimes

The FBI believes the Saudi Arabian government “almost certainly” helps its citizens flee the country after they are accused of serious crimes, “undermining the US judicial process,” according to a newly declassified document obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The surreptitious action is done, in part, to spare the wealthy Persian Gulf kingdom embarrassment, the FBI said. Intelligence officials believe the flights from justice will continue without intervention by the American authorities.

The FBI believes the Saudi Arabian government “almost certainly” helps its citizens flee the country after they are accused of serious crimes, “undermining the US judicial process,” according to a newly declassified document obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The surreptitious action is done, in part, to spare the wealthy Persian Gulf kingdom embarrassment, the FBI said. Intelligence officials believe the flights from justice will continue without intervention by the American authorities.

[Tami]

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.

Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial recognition products used by the police — including Clearview’s — haven’t been vetted by independent experts.

Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested.

The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it. And he said my photo had rung alarm bells because the app “flags possible anomalous search behavior” in order to prevent users from conducting what it deemed “inappropriate searches.”

Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.

Police departments have had access to facial recognition tools for almost 20 years, but they have historically been limited to searching government-provided images, such as mug shots and driver’s license photos. In recent years, facial recognition algorithms have improved in accuracy, and companies like Amazon offer products that can create a facial recognition program for any database of images.

Mr. Ton-That wanted to go way beyond that. He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo. Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition.

[Tami]

Pro-gun activists threaten to kill state lawmaker over bill they misunderstood

Virginia’s only socialist state legislator said he has been the target of multiple death threats over a bill that pro-gun activists misinterpreted as a potential threat to their rights.

The legislation introduced by Lee Carter, a 32-year-old Bernie Sanders-endorsed socialist, would allow public school teachers to strike without being fired, and has in fact nothing to do with guns. But some gun rights activists wrongly interpreted it as an attempt to fire law enforcement officials who might refuse to comply with gun control laws introduced by Virginia’s new Democratic legislative majority.

The result, Carter said, has been a torrent of threats and abuse on social media, from promises to vote him out of office, to claims that “this is tyranny and you know what we do to tyrants,” to explicit threats of murder, like, “I’m going to make sure you don’t live through this legislative session” or “I’m going to kill this guy, y’all make sure you don’t forget my name.”

His original bill did not even get a hearing last year, he said, in part because his fellow lawmakers were concerned about the possibility of strikes by police officers undermining public safety. So he re-wrote the bill language, allowing all public employees except law enforcement officials to strike without penalty, and re-introduced it for the 2020 legislative session.

But when some gun rights activists read the bill, they claimed it meant something entirely different. Carter’s bill to allow teacher strikes was written into a broader narrative “that spread like wildfire within the conspiracy-minded parts of the rightwing internet”, he said, claiming that the state’s Democratic governor was working to confiscate Virginians’ guns, and that his new legislation was designed “to fire cops who don’t confiscate guns”.

That conspiracy theory relied upon a basic misreading of the bill text, which in fact kept longtime Virginia law intact for law enforcement officers, and created a new exemption for other public employees.

While a gun rights YouTube channel had appeared to be central to spreading the misreading of his bill to a wide audience, Carter said that some of the misinformation about his bill appeared to be fueled by police unions, and even by a fellow Republican state lawmaker – all people, he said, who should be able to accurately read legislation.

[PaulBullion]

the second most popular candidate with African Americans

AKA the guy with the highest name recognition in a crowded field.
Citing that statistic is like saying that Jeff Bezos and I are both billionaires, on average.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

AKA the guy with the highest name recognition in a crowded field.
Citing that statistic is like saying that Jeff Bezos and I are both billionaires, on average.

The primary season has been going on since the summer and the first caucus is next month. None of these candidates are going to get more visible by the end of the primary. You don't get to say he's bad for blacks and that he has issues with blacks with next to no evidence, and then say the actual data doesn't matter anymore because you have excuses for why the polling says the exact opposite.

This is the same argument people made about Trump in the 2016 primary. "the polls aren't real and it's crowded". No they usually are real. Bernie has conistently had strong support with African American's and particularly the youth. He is also exceptionally strong with Hispanics as well. If anything the only place he really struggles is with old people who tend to skew more conservative and prefer moderate candidates. Quite frankly, the logic that "oh the primary will end some candidates and people will shift somewhere else and change the race" almost never pans out. Usually the more well known people end up staying in the race at the end and their trends go the same way. Biden will likely take on more older black southern voters and Bernie will take on more younger black voters in urban centers outside the south.

Building on momentum after the first couple of primaries is historically more important than this idea of the field getting less crowded. This is even more relevant when you look at the make up of this race. Biden is well known, Bernie is well known. Warren is about as well known as you can be for a standard Senator. Buttigieg is the only real unknown with a chance of being darkhorse who could maybe win the nom if the right sequence of events happens. He just happens to have huge negatives with black voters so it's incredibly doubtful he picks any up and realistically, being more conservative and having older support, even if he did, it's a pretty fair assumption to guess which block he would pull from in that unlikely scenario.

Anyways that's beyond the point and going too much into the weeds. The point is the stupid narrative that was recklessly tossed around on here about Bernie being bad for black people and not resonating with them was always garbage with nothing real to back it up.

[PwrdOn]

AKA the guy with the highest name recognition in a crowded field.
Citing that statistic is like saying that Jeff Bezos and I are both billionaires, on average.

Are you talking about Biden or Sanders here? Between the two, Biden has a far more troubling record on race issues and there is no great love for him among his black supporters, or any of his supporters really, the only reason anyone would ever vote for him is that tired old argument that he's the only one that can win. Never mind that his whole vision of "nothing will fundamentally change" isn't really inspiring to Obama loyalists or people hoping to actually address the problem of racial inequality in this country.

[SquirrelMan]

Fun game: Search #QAnon on Facebook and Twitter and tweet to those lunies that:
Both Trump's new lawyers Starr and Dershowitz were previously members of the Epstein defense team.

After doing it to about 60 Qanon accounts yesterday and getting any kind of reaction from only 1, I am pretty sure that Qanon is even ore bot supported than I had guessed.

Oh, and the one reaction was "The lawyers didn't commit the crimes." Probably from somebody who endlessly shared memes about Hillary defending a pedophile as a lawyer.

[SquirrelMan]

The idea that Sanders is in any way popular with African Americans because he hangs out with Nina Turner and comes in second in a field including ... checks note ... Pete Buttigieg ... is adorable, really. I want to take that idea home and build it a little paper castle and a papier-mâché throne.

[Mister Mets]

Are you talking about Biden or Sanders here? Between the two, Biden has a far more troubling record on race issues and there is no great love for him among his black supporters, or any of his supporters really, the only reason anyone would ever vote for him is that tired old argument that he's the only one that can win. Never mind that his whole vision of "nothing will fundamentally change" isn't really inspiring to Obama loyalists or people hoping to actually address the problem of racial inequality in this country.

Why do you assume there's no love for Biden among his black supporters?

African-Americans generally have a preference for politicians who offer incremental change, which may be one reason they didn't go for Sanders.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/...ck-voters.html

In addition, many do like Biden. They see him as an important ally, who helped the first African-American President get elected and succeed. Columnist Keli Goff summed it up on an appearance on Left, Right and Center. “To succeed in primarily nonblack spaces––you only do it when you have really good allies,” she declared. “And I think that one of the things Biden gets credit for, rightly or wrongly, is this idea of being the blue-collar white guy who helped give Obama legitimacy with some of the blue-collar, white, male voters who voted for Obama-Biden and then crossed over for Donald Trump. I think African Americans give credit for that. Especially when the Obama campaign was really struggling, not always fairly, with some of these race-baiting attacks, sending Biden out on the campaign trail to fight some of those fights made a difference.”

There isn't as much inherent appeal in Buttigieg, Sanders or Warren.

There is also an alternate to the idea that we need radical steps to solve the country's problems, which is that we've had significant incremental progress in all categories of areas.

Andrew Sullivan summed it up.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...-progress.html

Why this sudden ratcheting up of rhetoric? On the right, it’s fueled by the kind of absurd hyperbole that Trump uses all the time. On the left, it’s Trump himself. His extremism, misogyny, transphobia, and racism have all provoked a sharp turn to the left among Democrats. But, as you can see from the workforce numbers for women, there’s little he can actually do to prevent the future from being female. He could tip the Court, which could, in turn, repeal Roe, but that would be a highly unpopular ruling and likely provoke a backlash that could lead to more moderate federal legislation in its place. Marriage equality is settled law, according to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Gay visibility is ubiquitous. Black unemployment is at record lows; black women are seeing real improvement in their careers and earnings; crime in urban neighborhoods is a fraction of what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, we have a bigot in the Oval Office — but his ability to influence these broader cultural tides is quite limited.

Some of the rhetorical excess is also about money. Interest groups for various subpopulations have a financial interest in emphasizing oppression in order to keep donations flowing.

But a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines. In a fascinating experiment, participants were provided with a chart containing a thousand dots that ranged along a spectrum from very blue to very purple and were asked to go through and identify all the blue dots. The study group was then broken in two. One subgroup was shown a new chart with the same balance of purple and blue dots as the first one and asked to repeat the task. Not surprisingly, they generally found the same number of blue dots as they did on the first chart. A second subgroup was shown a new chart with fewer blue dots and more purple dots. In this group, participants started marking dots as blue that they had marked as purple on the first chart. “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”

We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context.

[Tendrin]

Andrew 'Why Can't We Race Science' Sullivan isn't really a voice to trust.

[aja_christopher]

Why do you assume there's no love for Biden among his black supporters?

African-Americans generally have a preference for politicians who offer incremental change, which may be one reason they didn't go for Sanders.

A lot of black people accept "moderate" politicians (like Obama) because we know Republican "conservtives" will stifle any attempt at real change in America.

If your party wasn't always doing everything in their power to attack or disenfranchise black people and other "minorities" then maybe that wouldn't be the case.

But here we are -- with head Republican Trump in office being protected by his Republican supporters while rolling back civil rights as much as possible.

With regards to Sanders -- put simply: he has no real record to stand on regarding civil rights where at least Biden has Obama and the CBC's seal of approval.

-----
"In separate interviews with The Associated Press, the congressional [Black Caucus] trio offered similar reasoning for backing Biden, saying the white former vice president represents the ideological center of the Democratic Party and can appeal to the widest range of voters in a potential general election matchup with President Donald Trump.

“He can connect with the average American — black, white or brown,” said Butterfield, arguing that Sanders and Warren could threaten Democrats’ prospects to defeat an unpopular Republican incumbent. “Warren and Sanders cannot win North Carolina,” Butterfield said, because their policies veer too far left. “I have great respect for both of them, but they cannot win North Carolina. Joe Biden can.”

Butterfield and Cleaver finalized their decisions days after the CBC’s annual conference. Their endorsements give Biden three former CBC chairmen, with Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana already serving as Biden’s campaign chairman. Cleaver said he “struggled” with the decision, alluding to Booker and Harris when he said that “there are others that I’m closer to” than Biden. “I have nothing negative to say about them at all. I hugged both of them Saturday night” at the CBC gala, Cleaver said of the two black senators.

But he praised the former vice president’s experience and said he gives Democrats a chance even in states Missouri that moved decidedly to Trump in 2016.

“I told him, ’If you are the nominee, you have to campaign everywhere; you cannot surrender any geography to Mr. Trump,” Cleaver said, recalling a recent conversation he had with Biden. “He assured me he will not do that.”

Butterfield agreed, arguing that Biden’s approach on “kitchen-table matters” like college tuition assistance will attract voters in swing states. Warren and Sanders back free college tuition for public four-year schools, whereas Biden proposes only tuition-free community college. Sanders and Warren back single-payer, government-run health insurance to replace existing private insurance markets. Biden wants a “public option” plan that would be voluntary and sold alongside private insurance.

Cleaver, 74, and Butterfield, 72, said they’ve each heard criticisms from some younger black leaders and activists who question the complexities of Biden’s record and his understanding of racial politics in 2019.

“A lot of the young people don’t remember how supportive he’s been on civil rights,” Cleaver said. “He was strong on it back in the days when you could lose an election talking about civil rights.”

Butterfield said he’d ask Biden’s younger critics “to be patient and do their research and see that Joe Biden has been directly involved with the positive gains that we have experienced in the African American community ... for the last 40 years.” Cleaver recalled being mayor of Kansas City in the 1990s when Biden helped steer a crime bill that critics now partially blame for mass incarceration, even as it also included federal money for more police officers and a ban on some military-style guns.

“I supported the crime bill,” Cleaver said. “We had the Crips and the Bloods, a Jamaican gang ... crack cocaine had exploded.”

Echoing a point Biden has made on the campaign trail, Cleaver said most of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the bill, along with nearly all black mayors from large cities, despite the bill’s sentencing measures that are now so heavily criticized. “Ministers, politicians, mayors, city council members were all screaming, ‘Let’s do something!’” Cleaver said.

“Millennials don’t remember that history. ... Joe Biden — and I’ve told his people this — should not apologize for that.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/...ments-n1056821