Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

The revolution will be supervised.

When we show up, we win.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

The lights are all blinking red.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

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Late Night Open Thread: Prosecutors Consider Sam Bankman-Fried Incorrigible

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And they make a good argument, IMO. Per the Associated Press:

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s orchestration of one of history’s largest financial frauds in his quest to dominate the cryptocurrency world deserves a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years, federal prosecutors on Friday told a federal judge.

Prosecutors made the recommendation in papers filed in Manhattan federal court in advance of a March 28 sentencing, where a judge will also consider a 100-year prison sentence recommended by the court’s probation officers and a request by defense lawyers for leniency and a term of imprisonment not to exceed single digits.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November on fraud and conspiracy charges after his dramatic fall from a year earlier when he and his companies seemed to be riding a crest of success that had resulted in a Super Bowl advertisement and celebrity endorsements from stars like quarterback Tom Brady and comedian Larry David.

Some of his biggest successes, though, resulted from stealing at least $10 billion from investors and customers between 2017 and 2022 to buy luxury real estate, make risky investments, dispense outsized charitable donations and political contributions and to buy praise from celebrities, prosecutors said.

“His life in recent years has been one of unmatched greed and hubris; of ambition and rationalization; and courting risk and gambling repeatedly with other people’s money. And even now Bankman-Fried refuses to admit what he did was wrong,” prosecutors wrote…

They said crimes reflecting a “brazen disrespect for the rule of law” had depleted the retirement funds and nest eggs of people who could least afford to lose money, including some in war-torn or financially insecure countries, and had harmed others who sought to “break generational poverty” only to be left “devastated” and “heartbroken.”

“He knew what society deemed illegal and unethical, but disregarded that based on a pernicious megalomania guided by the defendant’s own values and sense of superiority,” prosecutors said…

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Repubs in Disarray! Open Thread: The House GOP Retreat (Noun *and* Verb)

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… Publicly, Republicans have cited a litany of reasons for not attending: from having to tend to reelection races to scheduling conflicts. GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, for example, is scheduled to appear on “Real Time with Bill Maher” later this week. Meanwhile, when asked if he was attending, GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told CNN: “No way, I have to run for governor.” And Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee quipped: “I don’t retreat, I move forward! I got a farm to run.”

But privately, some Republicans have complained about the venue choice. Sources said Speaker Mike Johnson selected the Greenbrier Resort because it was “family friendly,” in a break from past retreats which have taken place in sunny Florida – the preferred location of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

And other GOP lawmakers and aides told CNN they were simply not enthusiastic about the idea of having to huddle with the rest of their party at a time when Republican infighting has prevented them from even passing procedural votes…

In another hiccup for the retreat, the House GOP’s keynote speaker – Fox Business Host Larry Kudlow – had to drop out at the last minute, sources say. Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, will take his place instead.

Among the Republicans who have decided to skip the retreat include Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; Reps. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota and Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, the co-chairs of the Main Street Caucus; and Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, chairman of the Republican Governance Group…

 
Per the ever-upbeat USA Today, “‘Everybody’s tired’: Groups of House Republicans skip annual retreat, exhausted by GOP infighting”:

… “Everybody’s tired. I know I’m tired,” one House Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said. The intra-party battles that have roiled the House in recent months, the GOP lawmaker explained, has sapped the energy from some members.

Another House Republican who does not plan to attend noted frustration remains with ultraconservative lawmakers who have impeded House action and “is wearing everyone out” as a result.

The lawmaker reflected that there’s still hard feelings in the Republican conference, since it has been “less than six months since everything happened,” referring to the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

Lawmakers typically use the retreats to talk about policy, hold discussions about ongoing debates and more. But one of the handful of Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., told USA TODAY the events are “not productive.”…

Dozens of officials are also retiring from Congress in the coming months, given the dysfunction that has consumed the House recently. Those lawmakers don’t have much incentive to attend the retreat and “working on future agendas might not be as interesting,” Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., said.

… The chaos that has plagued House Republicans in the 118th Congress spilled over into the annual event — meant to promote team-building and set priorities — which returned for the first time in several years to The Greenbrier in West Virginia, a historic luxury resort nestled in the Allegheny Mountains.

“We live in challenging times, we live in a time of divided government. Democracy is messy. Sometimes it’s very messy. This is part of that process,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters gathered on The Greenbrier’s lawn, with members and their guests watching from one of the hotel balconies. Johnson, R-La., was joined by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, and North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Despite Johnson’s optimism, it was a not-so-triumphant return. Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow, who was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech, dropped out at the last minute. Presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump won’t be coming. And a spokesperson for the Congressional Institute, which sponsors the Republican Issues Conference, said just over 100 members of the 218-member majority had RSVP’d they were going. Some cited scheduling conflicts. Others were more blunt…

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Monday Evening Open Thread: As Mitch McConnell Sidles Towards the Exits…

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On McConnell Sidling Towards the Exits

McConnell isn’t even retiring — just ‘stepping down’ from his Leadership position, and not until November. But given the man’s history, it wouldn’t surprise me if he fell victim to the old-fashioned ‘dead within a year’ retirement trope, not least because his ‘fellow’ GOP senators currently hate him almost as much as we Democrats do. Nil nisi bonum doesn’t apply when only an individual’s career / legacy has been murdered, yet I doubt the actual obituaries will be any kinder.

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Grim Dawn Open Thread: Another Angle on GOP’s Katie Britt ‘Rebuttal’

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Some hours before Britt’s State of the Union ‘rebuttal’, Puck‘s journamalistic botfly Tara Palmeri posted “Mar-a-Lago V.P. Soul-Searching”:

Among the first to arrive at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday was Marjorie Taylor Greene, dressed in all black, at 4:30 p.m., when there were still just a handful of other people in the gilded ballroom. Within hours, of course, the royal court of Donald Trump had filled with red-hatted men and bleached blond women in sequins and leopard prints, who cheered as Trump pulled off a sweep (sans Vermont), essentially securing his coronation as the G.O.P.’s 2024 standard-bearer…

Greene then enumerated the reasons why rising star Katie Britt—the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the Senate, charged with delivering the rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address—isn’t MAGA enough to be Trump’s vice president. “Katie Britt, she’s a fairly new senator,” she told me, citing Britt’s underwhelming Heritage Action score (81) from memory. “Not as strong of a conservative as the base would like to see.” Perhaps there was another candidate Greene had in mind? “Of course, I’ll serve in any role that President Trump asks me to,” she said.

Trump himself spent most of the evening out on the patio, away from the applause and well-wishers, buttonholing high-dollar donors to help ease his financial troubles: a $41 million cash disadvantage relative to Biden and the D.N.C.; a deluge of campaign ads from well-funded Democratic groups; his tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, and hundreds of millions more in civil penalties. (Between the $83.3 million due to E. Jean Carroll for defamation, and $355 million plus interest owed to the state of New York, he’s on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars.) Perhaps that’s why the former president didn’t seem jubilant, exactly, when he sauntered onto the stage to deliver another “American Carnage”-style speech…

So while Greene seems to think that Trump will select his vice president based on their appeal to MAGA voters, the emerging consensus among campaign insiders is that his choice will come down to who can perform best with wealthy donors—the Republican constituency that still needs the most convincing before getting comfortable with another four years of Trump.

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Late Night Open Thread: His Parents Say Sam Bankman-Fried Is Too Pretty Frail to Go to Prison

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One can’t say this defence is totally worthless, since it has provided some salutatory content for us plebes. Molly White, at her Citation Needed newsletter, on “I am Sam’s low-level culpability”:

Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing is coming up in a month. He has now formally swapped out Mark Cohen and the rest of his rather unimpressive defense team for Mukasey Young [I49]. Concerns over potential conflicts of interest stemming from their simultaneous representation of Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky have been formally acknowledged by both Bankman-Fried and Mashinsky, and both have waived the potential conflicts. It seems Mukasey Young is mostly focusing on Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, because he’s hired a separate attorney — former prosecutor Alexandra Shapiro — to focus on his inevitable post-sentence appeal.

Mukasey and team have been busy on the sentencing side of things, on February 27 filing a 100-page-long sentencing memorandum that ends with a request that Bankman-Fried be sentenced to only 63–78 months imprisonment (5½ to 6½ years). The filing contains a long rebuttal to the as-yet-unfiled pre-sentencing report, which Bankman-Fried’s legal team says recommends he serve 100 years in prison. They describe such a sentence as “grotesque” and “barbaric”, and the kind that should be reserved only for “heinous conduct” like mass murder.

The filing also contains a glowing description of Bankman-Fried, starting at his early life, with headings like “Sam Is Not Motivated By Greed,” “Sam’s Caring For Individuals”, and “Sam’s Remorse”…

A final section on “Sam’s Condition” outlines Bankman-Fried’s neurodiversity, and says that he has already been suffering in jail as a result of harassment from other inmates, poor food options as a result of his vegan diet, and the generally grim conditions of MDC Brooklyn…

Bankman-Fried’s veganism comes up… a lot. Like a lot. In this sort of “ah, well your honor, I know he committed one of the largest financial crimes in history, but have you considered that he is a vegan?” way. One fellow effective altruist and vegan, David Pearce, writes of Bankman-Fried’s veganism: “here we have a person who (literally) wouldn’t hurt a fly incarcerated in a place that wasn’t built for folk with such soft hearts”. [Footnote: He would for sure steal all a fly’s money, though.] I actually found myself looking up if Judge Lewis Kaplan is himself vegan, because it’s so (excuse my phrasing) hamfisted that I wondered if it was an attempt to appeal to a bias of his.My guess is that so many of the letter-writers are effective altruists and vegans themselves that they see it as an impeccable testament to his character, and don’t realize others don’t necessarily assign it the same moral value. That, or they realize that “vegan” is a convenient way to signal “white, wealthy, and well-connected” without having to say it. Probably both…

 
Jeff John Roberts, at Fortune, on “Sam Bankman-Fried’s final con game”:

If you are a 31-year-old who is charged with major crimes, the normal course of action is to take a plea deal in order to reduce the sentence, and then hope for the best before the judge. You will probably also resign yourself to spending decades in prison. Unless you are rich and connected, of course. Then you may try a different strategy.

Take Sam Bankman-Fried. Even though he faced a mountain of evidence showing he committed one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history, he chose to roll the dice on a three-week trial. For his trouble, Bankman-Fried got rung up by a jury in less than four hours. And now that he faces a maximum sentence of 100 years or more when he goes before a judge next month, he is doing something else only wealthy and entitled people can do. He is trying to spin his way out of the whole mess…

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Saturday Night Slap Fights Open Thread: Repubs in Disarray!

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Be a lot more fun if so many innocent peoples’ lives weren’t hanging on the results, but I’ll take some consolation in Preacher Johnson getting handbagged by his own team. Per CNN, “Speaker Mike Johnson once again stuck in the middle as funding deadline looms”:

… With just days until a partial government shutdown and lawmakers out on recess until next week, House Republicans are divided over the best path ahead with Speaker Mike Johnson yet to make a call and House and Senate appropriators still haggling over conservative policy riders deemed poison pills by Democrats.

It’s a messy and complicated situation that comes as Johnson is still grappling with how to lead his unruly and narrow majority and as patience is running thin for the inexperienced speaker who has already punted several funding deadlines since taking the gavel.

“Now, we are in a fully Johnson-run House, and he’s got to own all the decision making in the 12 appropriations bills. That’s probably not best for him. Probably not best for public policy either,” Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said. “It’s actually drug out what is sort of inevitable here, which is we will either perform to the (spending caps) or have a government shutdown.”

In January, Johnson announced a deal with the Senate to fund the government at $1.66 trillion much to the frustration of his right flank. But the fight over where that money goes and what programs get funded has dragged on for weeks now, with appropriators working around the clock to try and reach a deal before the next government funding deadline on March 1. Johnson is facing pressure from members of the House Freedom Caucus to include dozens of policy riders that would never pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Earlier this week, Johnson huddled with members of his leadership team in Florida, but sources present said that Johnson didn’t articulate or lay out a specific path to keeping the government funded, instead summarizing how the process worked and signaling he hoped a deal could come together next week that he could put on the floor…

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Low Stakes Late Night Open Thread: Vehicle(s) of Broken Dreams

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… According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”…

CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich’s company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client’s page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website.

Most X users who are regularly on the platform can attest to a noticeable uptick in seemingly inauthentic activity in recent months. When a post goes viral on X, its now commonplace to find bots filling the replies with AI-generated responses or accounts with randomly generated usernames spamming a user’s mentions with unsolicited “link-in-bio” promotions. Now, there’s data which backs up that user experience.

Advertisers have also noticed X’s bot issues. In a recently published piece in The Guardian, Gene Marks, a small business owner shared his ad campaign results from X. After a small $50 advertising spend, X’s analytics shows that his website had received 350 clicks from approximately 29,000 views. However, according to Google Analytics, X wasn’t the source of any of the actual traffic his website had received during that time period…

When X’s Super Bowl traffic is compared to other social media platforms during the same time period, the bot issue on Musk’s platform appears even more stark. CHEQ also provided data to Mashable pertaining to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In terms of fake traffic, no other platform came close to X’s nearly 76 percent.

Out of more than 40 million visits from TikTok, only 2.56 percent were determined to be fake. Facebook sent 8.1 million visits and 2.01 percent of the monitored visits were classified as inauthentic. And over on Instagram, only 0.73 percent of the 68,700 visits from the platform were fake…

CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform’s respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram’s traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.

But, X once again fared the worst. Of the 759,000 visits from X, 31.82 percent of that traffic was determined to be fake…

… X’s problems clearly go well beyond the type of content being posted by real human beings. Advertisers typically pay social media companies based on impressions and/or clicks on their advertisements. And based on this traffic data, advertisers could potentially be paying Musk and company for visits from an audience consisting mostly of bots.

From my own extreeemely limited & recent experience curating followers, a fake rate (mostly ‘nudes in bio’, with a smattering of bitcoin scams) of 30-35% seems correct.

Elsewhere in the Elonverse:
Low Stakes Late Night Open Thread: Vehicle of Broken Dreams

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