Congress cleared a bill on Wednesday to remove from the Capitol a statue of Roger Brooke Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the racist Dred Scott decision, and replace it with a bust of the civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall. https://t.co/fPRkVtmvVe
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 15, 2022
Good news, if only as opposed to the alternative:
The U.S. Senate passed a stopgap funding bill to avoid a partial government shutdown ahead of a midnight Friday deadline, sending the House-passed bill to President Joe Biden to sign it into law https://t.co/NN97L2wAdw pic.twitter.com/lBqeH4ZZs5
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 16, 2022
COVID cases are going up across the country. But we have the tools, infrastructure, and know-how we need to manage this moment.
Today, we announced our Winter COVID-19 Preparedness Plan to ensure we stay ahead of increases in cases this winter. Take a look: pic.twitter.com/qULXMZYD4Z
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 15, 2022
Biden tells leaders of African nations at US-Africa Summit that he, Jill Biden, Sec of State Blinken, Treasury Sec Yellen, SecDef Austin, Commerce Sec Raimondo, USAID's Samantha Powers and others will visit. "I'm looking forward to see many of you in your home countries."-@POTUS pic.twitter.com/3KlkcoWnS1
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) December 15, 2022
Lest it be overlooked…
Just in: The Jan. 6 committee officially advises its last public meeting for Monday December 19. pic.twitter.com/1Xq5sUe3Eg
— Zachary Cohen (@ZcohenCNN) December 15, 2022
Special counsel Jack Smith's team has now sent subpoenas to state/local officials in all seven of the key states targeted by Trump & his allies as part of their bid to upend Joe Biden's legitimate electoral victory.
Story w/ @SaraMurray https://t.co/Naf1YSxqcm
— Zachary Cohen (@ZcohenCNN) December 14, 2022
The John Lewis Stamp
Former Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis will be featured on a U.S. Postal Service stamp next year. #gapol #atlpol @marcogrob
More details at https://t.co/AY8e7pKMHN pic.twitter.com/gLu7g0IpTh
— Rahul Bali (@rahulbali) December 13, 2022
I'm honored that this new stamp will join Atlanta's John R. Lewis Post Office in honoring a great man and a guiding light for justice and moral clarity. Two months ago, President Biden signed my legislation renaming our post office in honor of Mr. Lewis. pic.twitter.com/XWrbPfTwAQ
— Congresswoman Nikema Williams (@RepNikema) December 13, 2022
Biden throwing shade at Trump’s major announcement of a trading card collection today: https://t.co/GXM3GHd2i4 https://t.co/FPPWLO1EF6
— Akayla Gardner (@gardnerakayla) December 15, 2022
mali muso
TGIF! Proud to be a Democrat. :)
Looking forward to buying the John Lewis stamps when they come out.
Ohio Mom
I was hoping to catch up with Monday’s January 6th Committee hearing on Aaron Rupar’s twitter— he did a great job of culling video highlights from the other sessions — but now it appears he’s been shut down by Elmo.
I guess I’ll have to find a way to watch the whole thing in real time.
Sanjeevs
NYT scraped a bunch of MAL wedding photos from Facebook to show the doors of Trump’s storage rooms and offices are left wide open.
There’s a handy map too.
I’d be pissed if I had to pay Trump for America’s secrets whilst my rivals could just walk in and grab them.
Amir Khalid
I found this bit of weirdness on my YouTube home page. Enjoy.
soapdish
Every time I see Jack Smith I think it’s Jordan Peterson and my hackles immediately go up.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Interesting article on book censorship in high schools. At the end, there’s a long list of examples of bans. As you’d expect, most seem to involve books with LGBTQ characters or themes
ETA: Oops. I forgot the link.
Paul in KY
@Sanjeevs: Maybe those spies should have opted for the ‘Grand Platinum Super-Exclusive Secrets Plan’.
I hear exclusive walk-in access was one of the benis in that one. Also TFG would autopen sign the classified docs you chose.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Hey Anne, Phony Stark’s been banning reporters now at random for breaking the new secret Twitter TOS. Josh Marshall of TPM is saying the news is starting to move to Mastodon so you might want to start looking there material for these articles.
Gods, Musk is just like a teenager forum mod.
Kay
Cancellation is fine now. The correct middle aged, well-off, incredibly conventional and cranky people are doing the cancelling, so it’s fine.
It was always about power. They weren’t mad power was being used. They were just mad they werent the only ones allowed to use it. Now that it’s back in their hands they’re happy and the cancel culture panic is over, poof, like magic.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ohio Mom: Might try Mastadon from what Jos Marshall of TPM is saying.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: I’ve seen Marty Stuart and his band a couple of times. The tall dude on left with black cowboy hat is his nephew. Marty sure does have fabulous hair.
Thanks for the link.
Joe Falco
What a difference a change in administrations make with TFG referring to countries in Africa and elsewhere as “shithole” nations to Biden making promises to visit. I hope Biden uses every chance he gets when he visits African nations to throw TFG’s words back at him.
Ken
I’m definitely going to get some of those John Lewis stamps. They’ll tide me over until we get the $20 bills with Harriet Tubman.
(Just googled, and that’s not until 2030!? I see the Trump administration tabled it, no surprise. But there’s also a delay to get “tactile signifiers” on all the bills for visually impaired people, I suppose I can’t object to that.)
Soprano2
@Kay: I saw one reply to concern about all those reporters being banned that said “You don’t realize Twitter is operating exactly the same was as it did before, only now the people who are affected are different”. Evidently this is what conservatives believe, that it’s exactly the same now except that it’s liberals who are being “shadowbanned” and cancelled and kicked off, and of course they’re fine with that. How ironic that Mr. “Free Speech” of course turned out to the the thinnest-skinned whiny ass crybaby imaginable, as most billionaires are.
I especially get a kick out of the people who have no awareness that for decades everyone had a book in their house with almost everyone’s name, address and phone # in it, that was updated yearly, and no one thought anything about it. People these days act like their home address is some kind of nuclear secret or something.
ETA – I cannot imagine TFG having any kind of a summit with leaders from African nations, and I cannot imagine any of those leaders would have wanted to have a summit with him. We are so far behind China when it comes to Africa that it’s almost criminal.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I found this a bit amusing and oddly topical; Nevada historians talking about the movie Casino and history of the mob in Los Vegas. Beyond, the usual, it’s more complicated than pop culture thinks it is, it’s amusing to find out Trump tried to buy his way into Vegas in the ’80s and was too incompetent.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Well, if that’s the antiwokester argument it’s as dumb and poorly thought out as the rest of their arguments.
They’re saying they now support cancelling, as long as a white, middle aged, male billionaire is doing it. I knew they would because it was never about “speech” it was always about power- who is allowed to have it. Only they can have it. That’s the rule.
The truly funny part is Musk banning competitors. Good Lord. How his fans manage to twist themselves into pretzels to justify that should be worth seeing.
kalakal
APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day) posted this extraordinary image the other day.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap221213.html
gvgl
Jen Rubins article at the Washington Post today analyses some Democratic wins in the last election and what it means for winning. She finds that democrats that responded back to GOP attacks on them about being soft on crime won and those who hid that they were democrats lost. It came across to me as she considers herself team democrat now. She also mentioned that the candidates she interviewed often mentioned using abortion rights against the GOP.
Betty Cracker
@Ken: I kind of blame Lin-Manuel Miranda for the Tubman delay. IIRC, the Obama admin was all set to put her on $10s until the Hamilton fanatics objected, which delayed the process.
Kay
Am I understanding correctly that Musk didn’t file a police report for the stalking he alleges? That the police contacted HIM after he made the claim?
Just so you know it is generally considered questionable by police and prosecutors when people make public claims of egregious offenses committed against them but never make a report. That’s considered different than keeping something secret and also not reporting it, which is consistent so not as suspicious. Proclaiming it publicly but not making a report is a red flag because a false report is a crime.
NotMax
Polish up that pole. One week until Festivus.
;)
Qrop Non Sequitur
What was your first clue? Book banning? Don’t say gay? Dixie chicks and Bill Maher?
They’ve always been this way. The only thing they update is the specific terminology. My free speech is paramount but yours infringes mine if it challenges me in any way.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
As of last that was yes, and many of the reporters Musk banned were apparently banned for tweeting about Musk’s claim his kid was stalked.
Ohio Mom
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yeah, I already have Josh Marshall’s and a few other Mastodon sites bookmarked. It’s going to be a while until my eyes adjust to the white letters on a black background though.
Aaron Rupar has a substack and he has a post there about being suspended. I don’t think he has a Mastodon account yet.
Other parts of Twitter keep on keeping on, with no evidence that other parts are crumbling. It’s weird.
Kay
@Qrop Non Sequitur:
The book bans are SUCH a mistake. Rather than smart and careful books about gay or trans people written by caring adults kids wil now get whatever garbage Tik Tok vomits up.
They’re really just the dumbest set of “public intellectuals” to ever come down the pike. I blame the lack of competition in our upper classes. They’re all nepotism successes or legacy admits. They need a scrappy, ambitious middle class cohort to knock some of them out of the running.
Soprano2
Exactly, they want to re-establish the way things were before the 1960’s happened, when they decided who could have influence in the public square and who couldn’t! Only when they do it they don’t say it’s “cancelling”, they claim it’s justified for some bullshit reason like “They shared publicly available information about my plane’s flight path and where it landed, they doxxed me!” I’ll be curious to see what Maher has to say about Musk when he comes back in January, because he claims he’s all for free speech and doesn’t want to ban anyone. I have doubts about that.
SFAW
Seeing John Lewis’s stamp brought a smile to my face.
Timill
@Ohio Mom: Preferences (on the RHS): select theme Mastodon (light) (top RHS) and Save at the bottom.
That should be black letters on white screen.
Soprano2
There was an editorial in our paper last Sunday written by a conservative woman for USA Today about the restaurant that cancelled the reservation for the conservative religious group because the LGBTQ workers looked them up and found out how hateful they were about gay people, and thus didn’t feel safe serving them (honestly I think they were dumb, but restaurants do reserve the right to refuse service under some conditions). She went on and on about how progressives are so hypocritical because of this, then at the end of the article she said “Of course someone not wanting to make a cake for a gay wedding or not wanting to design a web site for a gay wedding is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from this incident and they are totally justified and should be protected from having to do it”, thus cementing the idea that speech that offends her can be suppressed, while speech that she likes but offends others cannot be suppressed. Totally unsurprising.
Bunter
@Ohio Mom: I changed my background in Settings to white background/black text because I also found the default annoying.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It all seems to be just ordinary Forum Mod drama. Every time I have been on a moderator team there is always That Mod that everyone wonders why the admin let in and sooner or later he starts randomly banning and deleting things late one night.
I just view this all warning signs that Musk is going pull the plug on Twitter one night and we go doing to wake up to some the Twitter home page is just some rant by him.
Montanareddog
@Timill:
I think your instructions apply to the app
On the website, top left, edit profile, profile, appearance
ETA: doh! On the website, top left, edit profile, preference, appearance
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Timill: That is so much better! Thank you
Frankensteinbeck
@Soprano2:
Shades of Rowling’s “They shared the address of my mansion that’s on the public historic sites registry and is a tour bus stop! Then three people stood with signs on the sidewalk outside the gate to the grounds! No one has ever been more harassed and threatened than I am by these evil trans people!”
New Deal democrat
Earlier this morning, @MastodonMigration put up the following. Apparently there has been a new surge in accounts due to Twitter banning some prominent journalists:
“Public Service Warning
“Mastodon has a very big surge of new users right now. There’s no way to tell if it will be sustained, but at this early point it looks similar to Nov 18 when Musk pulled the employee purge.
“It is very challenging for system administration to accommodate so many new users. If your server starts to struggle, it is not broken and will get sorted out.”
J R in WV
Wife played the Ghost Chickens in the Sky, sounded pretty funny from here!
The Astronomy Puc of the Day was pretty good too.
And the photo and printing of Mr Lewis looks very professional, no surprise there. Hope the whole print run holds to that quality…
rikyrah
@Soprano2:
Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun.
Amir Khalid
This is the big story out of Malaysia today. The unlicenced campsite was so full because it’s the school holidays.
Aussie Sheila
@Kay: I just want say how much I love your spleen. Spot on, as always. ☺️
Frankensteinbeck
@Ohio Mom:
I wonder about non-English-language Twitter. It sounds like there are no moderators left for that, only the algorithm. They probably don’t care about Elon’s politics, but they’ll care a lot when their own trolls turn their subset of the platform into a sewer of harassment. I doubt we’ll ever hear about it, or know what’s happening to Twitter usage outside of the English speaking world.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Here is Keith Oberman’s account of Thursday Night Massacre, Oberman was banned too.
most amusing bit
ROFL
I will note, compare how all the reporters are just shrugging and saying, well it’s Mastodon then, we were looking for a social media site when we found twitter, to the years of frothing rage from the Conservative who were banned.
mali muso
@Amir Khalid: That’s so sad and scary. I grew up in Indonesia and have clear memories of waking up to the sound of sudden landslides on the mountains near our house anytime there was a sustained rainfall.
Layer8Problem
@Montanareddog: Instructions unclear, am now apparently the sole Twitter system administrator with 817,438 open tickets.
Ohio Mom
@Timill: oh thank you!
also Thank you to bunted and Montanaredog.
Good to know there are options and possibilities. I’ll figure it out!
Another Scott
Is it RICO? – a flowchart.
Hehe.
(via https://post.news/Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I used to live in Las Vegas, and I worked for an accounting firm that did casino audits. It has always amazed me that Trump was able to get gaming lixcenses back east in NJ and NY because his business practices were so completely slimy from day one.
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: How horrible. :(
@Frankensteinbeck: Musk seems completely clueless about and/or indifferent to the fact that the platform he bought has a global audience.
Ken
Pro tip: close all tickets with a generic “insufficient information to reproduce issue” message. If it’s important, they’ll open a new ticket. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@sab: interesting, the other thing that video got me wondering about is the claims Trump is mobbed up is false, because Trump would never pass an audit to be a good front man.
Ohio Mom
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I did notice that last night Aaron Rupar’s twitter went from “permanently suspended” to merely “suspended.” Which may or may not mean anything, can’t mean anything because Elmo.
ian
@Amir Khalid: That video raises interesting questions: Do chicken have souls? When they are ghosts, how are they laying eggs? How do the ghost eggs go rotten?
Ken
@sab: There are various theories about that, mostly involving money-laundering. They used to seem plausible to me, because how could anyone lose money running a casino? But, well, you know.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ohio Mom: Like I said, “Moderator Drama” now that Elmo has had a nap, some cookies and a long talk with some of the Twitter staff who just came into work, he is feeling better and having second thoughts and by tomorrow all the bans will be lifted and all forgiven, only for something else just as crazy to happen next Monday,
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ken: didn’t a lot of people, real companies, lose money trying to turn AC into the Vegas of the north-east? trump just over-invested in too large, too gaudy hotels that couldn’t draw the traffic to prop them up?
seems to me trump’s real money laundry was real estate, even if I confess I’ve never been entirely clear on how it works
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ken: That was because (and this is going sound oddly familiar)Trump saddled his casino with an impossible debt load before the casino ever opened.
gene108
@Soprano2:
Prior to MapQuest, and the current ability of anyone with a smartphone to have GPS at their fingertips, having an address didn’t mean much unless you already knew how to get to the address or you were willing to spend time going over a city map to find the address.
There’s a lot of information besides addresses that’s now available with a quick internet search thanks to social media from LinkedIn to Twitter to TikTok to Facebook that the level of privacy we used to have no longer exists.
lowtechcyclist
@Timill: Thanks for the tip, if I’m going to spend time on Mastodon, white letters on a black screen would have killed the deal.
Anne Laurie
Best I can understand — and numbers are not my forte — Trump wasn’t a ‘front man’, he was a puppet. The mob used him to work his daddy’s old connections for licensing approvals, and then stole everything out of the Trump Casino(s) from construction workers’ faked overtime, to overpriced building materials never delivered, to ghost employees (paying 17 people when there were never more than 7 on site), to siphoning off chips.
Trump may or may not have had some idea of what was going on, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to complain to the authorities about any of it…
sab
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He was getting loans from his dad because he didn’t have enough capital. That is a complete no-no in Las Vegas. They don’t allow secret investors.
And in Nevada if you break ground to start building a casino before you are approved for a gaming license then you will never get a gaming license. They don’t want you to use the leverage of your big investment to force their hand with local governments desperate for jobs and business. That is exactly what he did in NJ.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Anne Laurie: @sab: I remember this story coming up during the campaign. This write-up is from ’91, and makes it look like ol’ Fred had some explaining to do, but I don’t remember any legal or financial blowback in the later reports
I remembered the story being Fred sending his chauffeur with a briefcase full of cash. Close enough
PAM Dirac
@gene108:
I do a lot of genealogy, including using DNA tests. There is controversy about DNA tests, but by far and away the most privacy invading source of information is obituaries and you can get lots of them easily though services like newspapers.com.
ETA: You also find out using newspaper searches that a lot of papers used to publish birth details, and even hospital admissions and discharges. That info might not have been easily available world-wide, but it was easily available in your community, so I’m sure the privacy situation is as different as some people make out.
mrmoshpotato
@Aussie Sheila:
I have so many questions I’m afraid to ask.
Kay, I think you have a secret admirer – of your spleen.
Soprano2
@gene108: That’s true, but I’m talking about the hysterical anxiety people now have over the idea that someone can find out what their home address is. What you put on social media and how it can be viewed is a choice you make. People used to be able to look you up in a phone book, then look at a map and come to your house, no big deal and no one got hysterical about that. Now we have people claiming that sharing publicly available information is “doxxing” and is dangerous.
UncleEbeneezer
That Biden tweet is one of the reasons I love him. I know it is probably via a staffer, but it is very much in his own voice. Biden is one of the only Dems who can/will just get tell Trump/DeSantis what fucking tools they are and do it in a folksy, inoffensive way. Like Pelosi, he can throw shade with real expertise. It’s one of the reasons I love his chances in 2024 if there are debates.
UncleEbeneezer
For anyone who might be interested, we watched The Nutcracker & The Mouse King on Marquee (Amazon add-on) last night and it was really fun. Definitely not your traditional, typical approach to the classic. We watch several Nutcrackers every holiday season so it’s always nice to find some that give it a new and interesting spin. For this one, the dance was much more modern (at times) and cool costumes:
“The plot of The Nutcracker is based on a novella by E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of the most famous writers of German Romanticism. Hoffmann’s masterful fairytale virtuously jumps back and forth from a dream to reality and interlaces many narrative levels. In its adaptation as a ballet libretto by Alexandre Dumas and Marius Petipa, it lost much of its dark romantic fantasy. The second act of the ballet, for example, consists only of a divertissement that has almost no plot, featuring a colorful sequence of dances and stage effects.
The German choreographer Christian Spuck attempts to distance himself from the Dumas/Petipas version and puts the literary origin at the heart of his ballet. Christian Spuck is more interested in the fantastical nature of the original than in the delightful Christmas fairytale. Therefore, he brings back the fairytale of the princess Pirlipat, who turns into a nut monster, to the storyline as it was told as a back story to The Nutcracker in E.T.A.
In Rufus Didwiszus’ stage setting, the workshop of the godfather Drosselmeier turns into an old revue-theater, where the characters of the ballet come to life. Spucks’ choreography plays with the richness of characters in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narrative cosmos, the absurdity and overwrought humor that inhabit them. But he also looks down into the dark abyss of Romanticism.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Soprano2: haven’t people been dragging celebrities on PJs (as they call them on Succession) on social media for a few years now? I don’t remember anyone calling it doxxing or a threat to the Kardashians or Matt Damon or whoever
Burnspbesq
@Ohio Mom:
Rupar has migrated to Post, along with Popehat.
Lacuna Synecdoche
From the Annals of Changing Expectations:
So, I just saw this Biden tweet from yesterday, and my first thought was: There are still 145,000 people on twitter?
Brachiator
@NotMax:
A good Festivus pole is unpolished. Maybe even has a little rust on it.
CaseyL
@Timill: Thank you! I also find the white-on-dark text uncomfortable to read, and this will improve it considerably!
Now if I could do something similar for the scroll bar button, that would be perfect.
Burnspbesq
The silver lining in all this is the possibility that people who actually know something about building cars might, at least temporarily, be in charge at Tesla.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Anne Laurie: Ok, they basically knew Small Hands is too much of big mouthed idiot to be part of the scheme, so he became the patsy. That makes sense.
CaseyL
@CaseyL: Hah! Changing the layout theme also takes care of the invisible scroll bar button – this is GREAT! Thanks again, Tim!