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Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

You are here: Home / Archives for Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

Late Night Open Thread: The Company He Chooses

by Anne Laurie|  April 28, 20242:36 am| 37 Comments

This post is in: Trumpery, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

When your sport is awash in Saudi money, but you still realize Trump is brand damaging and angle keep him away: https://t.co/Wo4WzLgJuK

— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) April 27, 2024

The Miami Grand Prix sent a cease and desist letter Friday night to a prominent Trump fundraiser, informing him that he cannot use a suite at an upcoming Formula One race as a high-dollar fundraiser for the Trump campaign. Trump, according to multiple people familiar with the event, has been planning to attend the race.

The letter was sent to Steven Witkoff, a longtime Trump friend who recently testified on behalf of Trump in a suit in New York that resulted in a New York judge handing down a $350 million civil fraud judgment against the former president for financial misdeeds.

“It has come to our attention that you may be using your Paddock Club Rooftop Suite for a political purpose, namely raising money for a federal election at $250,000 per ticket, which clearly violates the Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix suite license agreement,” read the letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “If this is true, we regret to inform you that your suite license will be revoked, you will not be allowed to attend the race at any time, and we will refund you in full.”

The Miami Grand Prix is scheduled for May 5 at the Miami International Autodrome in Miami Gardens. A spokesman for the race declined to comment…

Reached Friday by phone, Witkoff said, “This is something fake, for sure,” but declined to comment further.

Witkoff donated more than $2 million to Trump’s political action committees, according to a 2021 Pro Publica story.

When Mohammed Bone Saw’s beneficiaries go Ugh, too gross for our brand… for some reason, I was reminded of a certain ‘Irish poem‘.

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Late Night Open Thread: The Company He ChoosesPost + Comments (37)

Saturday Morning Open Thread: All We Can Do Is All We Can Do

by Anne Laurie|  April 13, 20248:52 am| 111 Comments

This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Healthcare, Proud to Be A Democrat, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

Morning Joe put together a montage of Trump saying he wants to "terminate" Obamacare — something he now claims he doesn't want to do pic.twitter.com/r1kxOkT5Pn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2024

BREAKING: The Biden campaign put together this montage of every time Donald Trump threatened to cut Social Security and Medicare. Retweet to make sure every American sees this.pic.twitter.com/NDgevQ9Pd6

— Biden’s Wins (@BidensWins) March 11, 2024

. @Senlaphonza talked to me about being the only Black woman in the Senate. She expects more Black women to run for offices. "We have to be seen and we have to be at the table…Get used to it,'' she told @USATODAY. https://t.co/DAfd1ekSEV , @TheBlackCaucus, @usatodayDC

— Deborah Berry (@dberrygannett) April 12, 2024

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The Many Tragedies of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

by Anne Laurie|  March 29, 20248:50 am| 127 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Immigration, Technology, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

The bodies of two people, who have been identified as 35-year-old Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and 26-year-old Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, were recovered in a red pickup truck Wednesday morning from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse site. https://t.co/nNH4BbizIg pic.twitter.com/nUJFZqt0Mr

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) March 27, 2024

I gritted my teeth and bought a Bulwark subscription. Andrew Eggers, “What Went Wrong on Dali?”:

What do you do if a man-made disaster turns out to be nobody’s fault?…

Eight workmen were on the bridge at the time; two were rescued, and six are now presumed dead. That the attempts to recover their bodies have so far been fruitless is a grim illustration of just how nasty a logistical problem the collapsed bridge presents—a tangle of twisted metal and concrete rubble submerged in murky water 50 feet deep. They don’t even have the Dali out yet. Pinned under huge trusses from the bridge, with crew unsure whether the ship is safe to navigate even if it were free, the massive vessel could take weeks to move.

Until the channel is cleared—to say nothing of the bridge being reconstructed—the economic damage will be significant. The vast majority of the Port of Baltimore’s shipping facilities are now cut off behind the wreckage of the bridge. Much Baltimore-bound commerce can be routed through other east-coast ports, but that means extra load on already stressed supply chains; meanwhile, according to White House estimates, 8,000 Baltimore longshoremen will be sitting on their hands…

Should the ship’s mechanical failure have been foreseeable? It’s too early to say, although you can bet investigators will find out. “It’s likely that virtually every pilot in the country has experienced a power loss of some kind [but] it generally is momentary,” Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots’ Association, told USA Today this week. “This was a complete blackout of all the power on the ship, so that’s unusual. Of course this happened at the worst possible location.”

That’s the bottom line here: How flatly unlucky the Dali was at every turn. The worst possible location to lose power—after the tugs that turned it out to sea had detached, but before it was safely out of the harbor. The worst possible drift once it lost power—whether due to the position of the rudder, or wind, or current—apparently compounded by the ship’s response to the crew throwing it hard astern in a desperate attempt to slow it right before the crash.

Maybe they’ll find a culprit—some human error to pinpoint, some regulatory deficiency to address. But maybe the collapse of the Key Bridge will just prove one tragic and hugely costly demonstration that shipping has risks, and keeping those risks at acceptable levels isn’t the same as getting them to zero.

The pilot of the cargo ship Dali called for help minutes before it hit a bridge in Baltimore, according to audio from the vessel’s ‘black box’ https://t.co/XNmvqqQNf2 pic.twitter.com/Kl0VJsUhia

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 28, 2024

Baltimore bridge disaster: immigrants died doing job 'others do not want to do' https://t.co/kwKik54gSb pic.twitter.com/WhUB9DboUy

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 28, 2024

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The Many Tragedies of the Baltimore Bridge CollapsePost + Comments (127)

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

by Anne Laurie|  February 17, 20243:17 am| 103 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Tech News & Issues, Schadenfreude, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

I'm here just wondering how much of the bot traffic is actually paid for *by* Twitter to juice their advertising numbers.

Feels like a *very* Elon thing tbh

"The majority of traffic from Elon Musk's X may have been fake during the Super Bowl" https://t.co/QnWrgHRybL

— dave, aspiring peasant ???? (@aspiringpeasant) February 16, 2024

… 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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Low Stakes Late Night Open Thread: Vehicle(s) of Broken DreamsPost + Comments (103)

‘Gun Issues’ Open Thread: Not Enough Time Between Public Tragedies

by Anne Laurie|  February 14, 20247:06 pm| 41 Comments

This post is in: Gun Issues, Open Threads, All Too Normal, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

Reporter: What are you giving up for Lent?

President Biden: You guys pic.twitter.com/SYUL9Lqnv8

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 14, 2024

Would that President Biden, and the rest of us, had that luxury. There are times I’m very glad to be a volunteer aggregator on a not-quite-ten-thousand-top blog, and not a professional journalist. Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on the last ‘Second Amendment’-related tragedy — “The Shooter’s Family Was Begging for Intervention Before She Opened Fire at a Megachurch”:

… Our latest unfortunate public exercise of Second Amendment freedoms took place in Houston, at the headquarters mega-church of Joel Osteen, a prominent teevee huckster Pharisee. (Osteen was the whited sepulcher who refused to open his megachurch so that poor and homeless people would not be left outside to face Hurricane Harvey in 2017.) On Sunday, a 37-year old woman named Genesee Moreno showed up at Lakewood Church with both her seven-year old son and her AR-15 in tow. She set up a firefight with two off-duty cops that ended up with Moreno dead, her son in critical condition with a gunshot wound in the head, and a bystander slightly wounded in the leg. The subsequent investigation has revealed Moreno to be quite insane. From CNN:

“My daughter-in-law when she was taking medication for schizophrenia was a very sweet and loving woman,” Walli Carranza, the mother-in-law of 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno wrote in a Facebook post that Moreno had been put under an order for emotional detention in 2016. She had a mental health history documented by Houston police, said Christopher Hassig, commander of the Houston Police Department’s homicide division. Carranza, the shooter’s mother-in-law, had unsuccessfully petitioned to be declared conservator of Moreno’s son Sam in 2022. She said Sam was wounded in the head when off-duty officers shot and killed Moreno at the church. Moreno should never have been allowed to own firearms, her mother-in-law said. Texas has no red flag law – also known as an extreme risk protection order law – that would allow authorities to take weapons from a person thought to be in crisis.“

…

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‘Gun Issues’ Open Thread: Not Enough Time Between Public TragediesPost + Comments (41)

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Bringing Minnesota & Wisconsin Together

by Anne Laurie|  January 26, 20247:06 am| 342 Comments

This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

Nothing like having a beer with some great union workers and ?yes, that would be @JoeBiden? in Superior, Wisconsin. ?@AFLCIO? pic.twitter.com/caMGiRXjPe

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) January 25, 2024

Opened in 1961, the Blatnik Bridge connects Minnesota and Wisconsin over the St. Louis Bay.

For decades folks talked about replacing it, but it never happened. Until today.

Today, I’m proud to announce over $1 billion from our infrastructure law will be used to get it done. pic.twitter.com/WIkhZ3asdo

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 26, 2024

The governors of Wisconsin and Minnesota, thanking Pres. Biden and all who voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law… and taking a dig at the Republican House members on either side the bridge who voted against the bill: Pete Stauber from MN, Tom Tiffany from WI. https://t.co/zQnEdh7IWG

— UpNorthNews (@UpNorthNewsWI) January 25, 2024

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Bringing Minnesota & Wisconsin TogetherPost + Comments (342)

Thursday Evening Open Thread: Oklahoma, Not Okay

by Anne Laurie|  January 4, 20245:35 pm| 119 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Venality, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You

Despite one of every five Oklahoma children living through food insecurity, the state won’t participate in a new federal summer food program for children, reports @denwalthttps://t.co/qzDu7fUOad

— Ben Felder (@benfelder_okc) January 3, 2024

Guess the GOP has its latest campaign slogan: Those kids wanna eat, let ’em find a job!

Despite one of every five Oklahoma children living through food insecurity, the state won’t participate in a new federal summer food program for children.

Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office cited uncertainty about how the federal government will administer the program.

The Summer EBT program would have doled out $40 per month this summer for children who get free or reduced price meals during the school year. Families would be able to purchase groceries using an electronic benefits transfer, or EBT card. It’s similar to the pandemic-era children’s food program that recently expired, which gave eligible families $120 per child to buy food during summer months.

Chris Bernard, president and CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free Oklahoma, said the governor’s decision was extremely disappointing.

“We are always in the bottom 10 in the country in terms of food security,” Bernard said. “Families and kids are struggling for sure, and the (summer food) program was something we’ve supported for a long time.”

Estimates vary, but Oklahoma has about half a million children who could qualify for the Summer EBT program. USDA estimates there could be 403,000 children who are eligible, while the number of children eligible for a similar program launched during the pandemic was about 640,000…

Maybe some of y’all are visual learners! 🤞Here’s a visual of why it’s a bad call for the gov to not opt in to a summer food program (paid for by OUR federal taxes) 👀 ⬇️

*For y’all who hate maps/graphs: Oklahoma has the 2nd highest food insufficiency (think hunger) rate! pic.twitter.com/O2ZCYh2Bze

— Rep. Jacob Rosecrants (@jacobrosecrants) January 4, 2024

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: Oklahoma, Not OkayPost + Comments (119)

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