There was a very interesting note in the excellent Washington Post piece about the Comet Ping Pong gunman:
An oddly disproportionate share of the tweets about Pizzagate appear to have come from, of all places, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Vietnam, said Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University in North Carolina. In some cases, the most avid retweeters appeared to be bots, programs designed to amplify certain news and information.
“What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” Albright said. “These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”
Online, the more something is retweeted or otherwise shared, the more prominently it appears in social media and on sites that track “trending” news. As the bots joined ordinary Twitter users in pushing out Pizzagate-related rumors, the notion spread like wildfire. Who programmed the bots to focus on that topic remains unknown.
What a strange coalition of reg’lar folks and twitter bots the right-wing has become.
James E Powell
If only Hillary had paid more attention to the concerns of the twitter bots . . .
Oatler.
In southern OR the Pizzagate story was reported like a whacky Pokemon Go misadventure. Junior Samples lives!
rikyrah
Uh huh
Uh huh
The Right’s War on Unions Will Finish Us Off
by Martin Longman
December 7, 2016 4:25 PM
Of course the Republicans are going to launch a new assault on unions, and it’s going to be devastating. Unions are a key pillar on the left, especially among progressives. It took me a little while to learn this. I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey in a family filled with professors. My progressive values stemmed not from firsthand knowledge of the plight of the coal miner or steel worker or government bureaucrat, nor from any personal experience of being a racial or religious minority, or even a woman. The scientific ethos of academia was my point of entry to opposition to the right-wing in this country. Everyone starts from some place.
When I left my hometown, I moved to Los Angeles where I found an even more diverse community than the one I had grown up in, and one with a wider chasm between the rich and poor. I went on to work for ACORN and expand my knowledge about what the urban poor and minorities face in terms of our criminal justice system, local governance, education, and employment opportunities.
Working with labor was my last stop along the way. I didn’t originally see unions as necessarily my natural allies or see their causes as my causes. There was overlap in many areas, but maybe we didn’t see eye to eye on the importance of the environment, for example. It was only when I realized how essential they were to getting political power that I began to understand that I needed them to be strong and motivated and effective.
It was then that I understood that academic progressives don’t have the option of picking and choosing which labor issues to support, but we need to have their backs so that they’ll have our backs.
Major Major Major Major
In unrelated news, the Times has changed their headline about Pruitt from “climate change dissident” to “climate change denialist”, so credit where it’s due.
slag
Bad spellers of the world—untie!
rikyrah
Quick Takes: Republicans Still Can’t Agree on a Plan to Repeal Obamacare
by Nancy LeTourneau
December 7, 2016 5:27 PM
When I wrote yesterday about the chaos among Republicans on the particulars of their “repeal and delay” strategy on Obamacare, it was before top Senate Republicans met with Pence to hash things out. Apparently meeting with the vice president elect didn’t help much.
After meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Tuesday to hash out plans to repeal Obamacare, top Senate Republicans are no closer to resolving an issue that’s splintering the GOP heading into the start of Donald Trump’s presidency: how long to give themselves to replace the law…
“The view on that probably is in a constant state of evolution, based on who you talk to,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader. “The question is: What’s that duration? Structurally, it’s at this point an open question. We’re hoping to get some direction.”…
The length of the transition is pitting hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz and members of the House Freedom Caucus, who favor a relatively speedy replacement, against Senate leaders who are pushing the three-year option.
“It took six years to get into this mess; it’s going to take us a while to get out of it,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “One thing I know for sure is we can’t fail to deliver on the promise to repeal Obamacare.”…
“The sooner we can get rid of it, the better,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the outgoing leader of the Freedom Caucus.
Hoodie
Is it just pushing paranoid clickbait (i.e., the stinkier the cheese, the more aroused the carp), or is the paranoia cultivated for other reasons?
Iowa Old Lady
@rikyrah: The decline of the labor movement is a large part of the reason for increasing income disparity. Factory jobs weren’t innately “good” jobs. Unions did that.
If you weaken unions, the only potential counter-balance to the power of employers is the government. Good luck with that at the moment.
artem1s
Fuck 2016. http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/12/08/1208-john-glenn-hospitalized.html
dammit.
Cermet
I, unlike many here, like our new robot over-lords …hope that pleases these monsters…uh, I mean our wonderful over lords …
SenyorDave
I was thinking about this while driving into work. Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime where any objective person would have to agree that he is not a role model for children. Both personally and professionally he is not a person a child should emulate. He is pretty much a worthless human being who does not seem to have ever done anything truly good in his life.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@SenyorDave: He might literally be the worst person in America. And we ended up with him.
Major Major Major Major
@rikyrah:
Gee, you’d think they could’ve come up with a plan before winning the presidency with all that time.
Betty Cracker
@Iowa Old Lady: Yeah, Rachel Maddow, to her credit, has been beating this drum ever since she’s had a platform — with charts show how the GOP-driven decline of unions has robbed Democrats of funds and organizing power for years, with nothing to replace it. I think it’s also critical to note that the GOP didn’t just go after union power at the top; it converted many white union workers by ginning up racial/gender panic.
If I were Queen of the Democrats, I’d look to movements like Fight for $15 as the future of organized labor. There’s nothing inherently more honorable in tightening a bolt on an assembly line (or its post-automation equivalent) than flipping a burger. The point is, people who work a full-time job should make a living wage.
Kryptik
So…apparently 5 jurors in the Walter Scott case were undecided, including the one who outright said, in ‘good conscience’, he couldn’t vote to convict.
There seems to be literally no way a cop can’t get away with murder, especially when it’s the murder of a black person.
Major Major Major Major
@Kryptik: A white cop. Peter Liang was convicted of manslaughter.
liberal
@Kryptik: Agreed, but in my own experience from watching local news, they often won’t convict or even be charged when the person the cops execute is white. Of course, it’s far worse for blacks and POC.
There was an example from my hometown. A white guy (maybe in his 20s?) took his dad’s pickup without his permission. The dad got pissed off and called the cops (I guess he reported it stolen). The son lead the cops on a chase. They finally cornered him, he couldn’t go anywhere. At that point they executed him by firing many shots from the rear of the pickup.
County DA, a Democrat IIRC, refused to charge the cops.
Not to mention incidents where cops chase people on interstates against department policy (e.g. no threat of imminent violence) and third parties end up getting killed.
germy
I’m always curious how stories like “pizza-gate” are told in my local news media. A few nights ago I tuned into my local TV news (owned by conservative sinclair) and they reported a man showed up at the restaurant because he’d read a story that children were being endangered.
No mention of Clinton. No mention of fake news. They made it sound like he was a normal man acting responsibly. And then they cut quickly to sports.
liberal
@Betty Cracker: Yes, but…a lot of those rank and file members are just idiots. Can we please acknowledge that they have agency?
IMHO there’s often a filter effect with these things. In other words, people with these right-leaning tendencies are attracted to construction trade positions, hence the union members in those trades tend to be further right.
Same thing with small business owners, who AFAICT are extremely prone to ultra-rightism. Their core personality type both tends (not everyone—tends) to make them right-wingers, and to not want to work for other people. Of course, I’m sure there are lots of wonderful small-business owners out there. But as a class they’re pretty right-wing.
SenyorDave
@Kryptik: This is fucking unbelievable, this is the foreman of the jury:
Montgomery said he had first thought Scott’s killing was murder after seeing the video of Slager firing eight times as Scott ran away. But after looking at other evidence, poring over the law and factoring in the judge’s instructions, he said the jury resorted to the lesser charge of manslaughter.
“We had to come to find out that he didn’t do anything malicious,” Montgomery said of Slager during the “Today” interview Thursday morning. “He had a brief disturbance in reason at that moment.”
Is every white person on this country turning into Donald Fucking Trump?
Botsplainer
@Kryptik:
That’s why I say there’s a nonzero chance for an acquittal or hung jury on Roof.
Major Major Major Major
@SenyorDave:
I don’t know if you noticed the election results, but most of them already were.
napoleon
For everyone above talking of cops getting off after killing civilians, this maybe of interest to you. One of those cases here locally (Cleveland Ohio) where something like 100 cops chased two black people in a car, for basically no good reason, and killed them with something like 150 shots. They all got off in a bench trail to a judge (whom I understand from my fellow attorneys is very well regarded) who just ran as a Dem for the Ohio Supreme Court and barely lost. This article today says that case is what sunk him.
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2016/12/cleveland_fallout_over_brelo_v.html#incart_river_home
Botsplainer
@liberal:
This is the reason why I’m not all that sad about Linda McMahon running the SBA. It will be a shitshow of rakeoffs for some contractor, and will cut back on the amount of money available to the bootstrappiest bootstrappers that ever bootstrapped.
It isn’t as if the SBA approved lenders weren’t already making it genuinely impossible for fledgling enterprises to enter the program.
PaulWartenberg2016
just destroy the f-cking bots.
Twitter needs to come up with a system to prevent bots from posting tweets. there has to be a process that forces the posting to verify the person doing the tweet is flesh and blood.
SatanicPanic
@Thoroughly Pizzled: I was thinking about this yesterday- is there anyone in American public life who is worse than that man? Excluding people already in jail I was drawing a blank.
rikyrah
Stung by criticism, Trump goes after local union leader
12/08/16 08:00 AM
By Steve Benen
Donald Trump should be incredibly busy. The transition period is limited, as we talked about the other day, presidents-elect are expected to maintain a rather grueling schedule, choosing a cabinet, attending security briefings, staffing a White House, speaking to international leaders, shaping a policy agenda, and even preparing for his inauguration. Every hour of every day counts.
It should’ve been a relatively minor story. Trump made claims about the Carrier deal that were demonstrably untrue, and Chuck Jones spoke up about it – as American citizens are still free to do. Last night, the labor leader appeared on CNN to “correct some of [Trump’s] math,” and soon after, the president-elect who lacks impulse control decided it’d be a good idea to go after Jones directly.
SenyorDave
@napoleon: They all got off in a bench trail to a judge (whom I understand from my fellow attorneys is very well regarded) who just ran as a Dem for the Ohio Supreme Court and barely lost. This article today says that case is what sunk him.
I was at the gym on a cardio machine when the judge read his ruling live and heard pretty much the whole thing. I didn’t know much about the case, and his ruling sounded reasonable (a lot of it is a tragedy but this was very complicated type wording). Then when I got home I read up on it and it was obvious that they executed the two people in the car and got off. Glad the judge lost.
Kryptik
@Botsplainer:
Yeah, as I noted elsewhere, the fact that Roof’s conviction may actually be in question because of this a damning sign for our system.
kindness
If the point is that the right has become a bunch of Twits I won’t argue with them.
Betty Cracker
@liberal: Agreed. I know the type well; my father built his business on the motivation of “you’re not the boss of me,” and he’s a wingnut to the core. Ditto innumerable tradesman uncles and cousins, who were okay with unions as long as they viewed their reps as their protection from the rapaciousness of the (white) man at the top but took a different view when told that unions were all about protecting lazy black folks or luring women into the workforce as competitors. This is why I see a Democratic Party strategy that centers on these folks as both immoral and ineffective.
SenyorDave
@SatanicPanic: Excluding people already in jail I was drawing a blank.
My guess is he is worse than most of the people in jail. He’s an admitted sexual predator. I think its safe to say most people who are bad have done worse things than they would ever admit. My guess is he’s also a rapist. Plus he stole from his own charity, what he did people could go to jail for.
Botsplainer
@SenyorDave:
“Ah wuz askeert fer mah lahf” has gotten many a southern cop out of a jam.
Major Major Major Major
@PaulWartenberg2016: trickier than you’d think for any number of reasons. especially since twitter explicitly allows bots and it’s part of the platform.
rikyrah
@SenyorDave:
Lips pursed.
rikyrah
@Botsplainer:
He went into a CHURCH. and MURDERED NINE PEOPLE AT BIBLE STUDY.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker:
I feel like all this energy being spent on how to appeal to working class white people is the Democratic equivalent of what Republicans do when their strategists say “Latinos should be natural Republicans, because they have strong Christian faith and work hard.” Sure, maybe working class white people SHOULD be Democrats for various ideological and structural reasons. Trouble is, they’re the base of the Republican Party, and they like what the Republican Party is selling. IMHO I’d prefer to see working class white people reforming the Republican Party, because it would be easier to find common ground and workable policy solutions between the White Working Class Party and the Diversity Party than between the Diversity Party and the Rich Christian Party.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@SenyorDave: What the hell are black people supposed to do if video evidence of a cop shooting a man in the back isn’t enough? Mass armament? A general strike? I’m scared to death for them. The new president will not care in the slightest what happens.
James E Powell
@napoleon:
If Judge O’Donnell had found Brelo guilty, would he have lost more votes statewide? Holding police accountable for killing African Americans is not exactly popular in the suburbs.
geg6
@FlipYrWhig:
I disagree. I know a lot of rich people and a lot of Christians. They are better on diversity than the WWC. Pretty much every person around here who calls themselves “working class”* is a straight up bigot. They hate brown and black people, they hate women (even if they are women) and they hate liberals most of all.
*And I put working class in scare quotes because most of the people I’m talking about that I know are not really working class. They are retirees, skilled trades people or upper middle class.
ruemara
@SenyorDave: Yes. SATSQ.
FlipYrWhig
@geg6: Hmm, I wouldn’t have expected that, but I take your point.
rikyrah
@napoleon:
I would not have voted for him either. Would never have voted for the GOP Candidate, but definitely could not have voted for him. Sometimes, you just gotta take a stand. And, if this is what he did ON THE BENCH, then there’s no need to elevate him. No way the Black community could trust him one iota when it came to social justice issues before the bench. And, if you can’t trust him, then don’t vote for him. And PHUCK the Democratic Party for actually choosing this muthaphucka as a candidate for the SUPREME COURT.
low-tech cyclist
Those evil-natured robots, they’re programmed to destroy us,
She’s got to be strong to fight them, so she’s taking lots of vitamins,
‘Cause she knows that it’d be tragic if those evil robots win
I know she can beat them…
Where’s Yoshimi when you need her?
liberal
@Botsplainer: But, obviously, Roof is not a cop.
Rob in CT
He had a brief disturbance in reason during the office-involved shooting. Poor fellow.