It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22 #Trump#Writing#josephheller#uspolitics#Politics
By sunsetting Section 230, the US Congress could be about to break the internet as we know it
The proposal to Sunset Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would eliminate the protections granted to internet platform providers from liability from users' actions
This legislation would deal a critical blow to the fundamentally American tradition of free speech and the internet as we know and love it
Local news is crucial to democracy, and it's disappearing — according to a new book by Steven Brill, excerpted in @Semafor, approximately twenty-two hundred papers and their websites went out of business between 2005 and 2021. That's created a vacuum into which "pink-slime" sites have poured. Brill writes about these sites that present themselves as legitimate publishers but are created to boost specific candidates and secretly financed by partisan funders, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Federated news publishers include @AxiosNews, @Semafor, @BloombergGreen, @19thnews, @ConversationUS and more. You'll also find many fantastic lifestyle publishers there, such as @Smithsonianmag, @cntraveler, @outside, @Kotaku and @TheRoot. We're working on a better way to separate publisher and curator profile details so you can easily find what you're looking for; stay tuned. If you're a publisher who'd like to onboard to Flipboard or have your account federated, fill in this survey:
Just a reminder that while one party spends on protecting voting rights the other marshals its legal assault to challenge election results - for an election that is months away - and disenfranchise voters.
Imperfect democracy vs authoritarianism is on the ballot this November. #VoteBlue if that matters to you.
"One #illustration by... John Cuneo rose above the rest, depicting #Trump extending tiny hands toward #handcuffs far too big for them.
“It was a good composition that highlighted the laughably small hands, and the image, while reflecting the past, predicted the future,” Mouly said of the magazine’s latest cover image... titled “A Man of Conviction.” “Even with a conviction for a felony, [will] Trump ever be hampered or constrained?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2024/06/01/political-cartoons-trump-guilty-verdict/
In a shock result, #India Prime Minister #Modi will likely have to seek a coalition government as projections indicate they will likely to fall short of the votes needed for a majority.
This could have significant policy implications in a country which has recently not been our favorite and a regime which has been secretly trying to assassinate dissidents of their regime within the US and other allies’ territory.
"In his first public testimony since stepping down from [U.S.] government office at the end of 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday fended off a variety of attacks from Republican politicians at a fiery hearing called to discuss lessons learned during the pandemic."
NBC News reports: "Fauci has emerged as one of the people most vilified by supporters of former President Donald Trump, with many blaming him for the pandemic based on a wide array of false or misleading claims. Calls to prosecute Fauci for unspecified crimes have become common on the right."
Well-known U.S. sports podcaster Colin Cowherd neatly sums up a recent development in politics & the law:
"Donald Trump is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade advisor, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer, & his company CFO. They’re all felons.
'Judged by the company you keep.' It’s a cabal of convicts."
The upside-down American flag goes mainstream as a form of right-wing protest.
NPR reports on the trend after an inverted American flag flew outside the Virginia home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in January 2021. Many conservatives displayed the flag in a similar fashion to protest Donald Trump's conviction in the hush-money case.
President Joe Biden is expected to issue an executive order that would shut down asylum requests to the U.S.-Mexico border once the number of daily encounters hits 2,500 between ports of entry, according to sources.