This is common? Did the Biden admin halt all communications, grants, travel, etc.? NPR posts transcripts of their programs, do you have a link so I can see what they said?
The Trump admin repeatedly weakened regulations around atrazine imposed by the Obama admin[0][1], only for the Biden admin to reimpose them.[2][3] I suppose we're about to see them severely weakened again.
Edit: to the people talking about RFK Jr., he's not going to be running the EPA; anti-regulation crusader and laissez-faire fan Lee Zeldin will be.[4]
You're overindexing on formal authority and prematurely discounting informal influence. RFK will be a prominent member of the administration. He'll have the ears of powerful people. He'll get some wins at the FDA (because it's blindingly obvious we're poisoning ourselves), and he'll be able to use these wins to drive changes at other agencies.
Is the next administration really likely to do, on purpose, anything that would affect earnings for large corps? It would absolutely blow my mind. I think RFK will do zilch unless it aligns with more profits for the right folks.
RFK was telling us he'd never support Trump, too, and here we are.
RFK has demonstrated repeatedly that he has absolutely no principles whatsoever, and he'll sell out if a soft breeze passes by. If the agribusiness sector tells Trump that banning this chemical will cost them 10% of their profits, Trump will tell RFK to get in line, and he'll give a slight whimper as he does so.
Trump was willing to build a coalition while Democrats were not. RFK, assuming he gets past the Senate, will be in a substantially better position to influence health policy than if he were to have snubbed Trump.
The game of politics makes enemies one day become allies the next. If you want real progress on an agenda, being dogmatic generally isn't the best way to accomplish it (imo).
I'm not American, but to me this looks like a preposterous take, when the Democrats had Cheney and a pile of other Republicans lined up in what looks more to me like a coalition than getting the endorsement of a bizarre personality-cult fringe candidate.
It depends on your perspective. Dick Cheney is generally considered persona non gratta due to his role in pushing the US into forever wars during the Bush Jr years. The Left hated him during the Bush and Obama years, the Right came around to hating him during the Obama and Trump years.
Trump Republicans very much dislike Liz Cheney for being completely against Trump during J6 investigations, and recent news implicates Liz Cheney in having tampered with lawyer relations for one the J6 testifiers [1,2]. Right-leaning commentary during the J6 investigations considered them sham investigations with the Republicans on the J6 committee often called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), as those Republicans were anti-Trump.
This is the perspective that makes the Chenys supporting Democrats seem ridiculous. Other republicans supporting the Democrats generally have pro-war big government views which are largely incompatible with the new Trump Republican base.
I'll disagree that this was just an "endorsement of bizzare personality-cult fringe candidate" as these individuals all have some political pull and have been given substantial positions in the upcoming administrations.
Cheney is just one person in a long list of republicans who endorsed Harris[1], and these people were part of a much longer list of republicans who opposed Trump[2].
Meanwhile The Trump-endorsing 'coalition' individuals in question are wildly unserious people, to the point that they're going to be laughed out of their senate confirmation hearings if they don't withdraw beforehand.
This is correct, there is an unfortunate acceptance of a lot of political mythology that I believe explains the results of the election (as we see above).
The GOP couldn't even form a coalition with itself, you saw a lot of people within the GOP who wouldn't endorse their candidate (the most stark example being the former VP). The democratic nominee coalition built to a fault. Many point to exactly this, and the failure to scorch the opposition to the degree warranted, as the reason for the loss.
RFK is your garden variety opportunist grifter, as are the entire confederacy of scammers and dunces (no offense, this is strictly a factual assessment) who are now on their way to positions of power based purely on their loyalty.
Was this linked from any of his existing social medias? Do we have any way of knowing it's actually him? I'd be just a tad cautious at this stage, given that the Substack page says it was 'Launched an hour ago' as of writing. The article, sure, dead man's switch, but the Substack publication itself was only created after his arrest?
Edit: also worth noting that whatever this is, it's not the document he had with him when he was arrested, since that apparently contained[0] the following excerpt, while this doesn't
> “These parasites had it coming,” one line from the document reads, according to a police official who has seen it. Another reads, “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
this archive link is floating around on blind and reddit. I have no idea if it's authentic. I didn't find a link to his other social media but the part about back pain lines up with this bit I found in a nymag article [0]
> Something seems to have changed in recent months. Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend had suffered chronic back pain and texted him images after getting surgery before going “radio silent” over the summer. Asked in court if he was in contact with family, Mangione said “until recently.”
The Substack is still live[0]. Anyway, one of the images in his Twitter banner[1] is an X-ray of a spine with a bunch of screws in it. The Substack is also named after Breloom and has a picture at the bottom, and that's also in the Twitter banner but doesn't seem otherwise prominent in any of his social medias. Not very hard to figure out a spinal issue as a potential motive and guess at an interest based on the banner and cook up a quick viral post. I'm not saying it's definitely fake, just urging a bit of caution for the time being.
I dunno, but the article continues to be live, and I can't imagine Substack doesn't know how to scrub posts from their platform if they wanted to. We'll find out eventually I guess, so I'll continue to urge people to be cautious with this and wait a bit.
X's mandatory self-reported figures in the EU show they lost about 6 million monthly active users in the first half of 2024. There doesn't seem to be similar data for the US and UK, but other metrics, like Similarweb, show declines in those places as well.[0]
Yeah. But they are trying to curb the repair market to their selected vendors (themselves). It is like the dealership that makes half the money from car repair and the other half from car sales. Then you have independent repair garages fighting dealership garages from making warranty rules that break warranty if other people were to repair them.
> Without Citizens United politics would be even more restricted to a much smaller set of even wealthier people
Really? Because there are many countries with far stricter regulations on campaign financing than the US had pre-Citizens United, that also have much more working class representation in their politics than the US.[0]
Well, one of the three fabs did. The newer two fabs, including the one with the most advanced processes, started in '22 and '24 respectively; that was thanks to the Biden Admin, per TSMC.[0][1]
Biden, Democrats and the moderate Republicans that came together to support this deserve the credit here. It's game changing stuff, a big chunk of which could be on the chopping block if the extreme takes power again.
The evidence shows that a disproportionate amount of funding went to urban areas in key swing states, which generally lean Democrat. Never saw a single ballot drop box out near a corn field. The money helped fund those sorts of initiatives.
> But election officials have said there is no indication of favoritism in how the money was distributed, according to previous AP reports. The board of the Center for Tech and Civic Life also includes Pam Anderson, a Republican and former elected clerk of a suburban Denver-area county. Republican election officials have also vouched for the program’s impartiality, including Brian Mead, a Republican election director in Licking County, Ohio.
But even if it was true that urban election offices received disproportionately more funding (obviously they received more in general since more people live there), that's still not the same as "putting $450m into Biden's campaign", which is what was claimed.
When an authoritarian govt is calling for the release of someone who runs a "private" messenger, it suggests they have a back door. Otherwise they tend to oppose all private messaging.
No, there is no logical link between the two events. Russian govt can protest that for propaganda reasons: to make a point that Western governments are restricting freedom of speech.
They're hitting that Uno Reverse card. Tbf, the US does a LOT of the stuff that we openly criticize Russia and China for. Which, I would hope that people have enough insight to recognize that this is a bad thing across the board. The only people who get hurt and face consequences from this kind of a thing are the citizens.
This is a key perspective people fail to take into account. We've been conditioned by movies, books etc to think everyone fits into these black and white "good and bad" categories.
Most western countries do horrific things we do not find acceptable, but when we do find out we hand wave it away because they're the "good guys".
They don't tend to care until large enough quantities of people start listening despite whatever filters (i.e. de-ranking social media posts) and countermeasures (i.e. cable news assets) are put in place before it gets to that point. Then they very likely have the ability to label it as misinformation and find a legal reason to prosecute under a number of broad categories: https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/false-informatio...
It came very close to this during Covid, and maybe once or twice since then.
You're free to say what you want, and everyone is free to ignore you if what you say doesn't jive with "common sense".
No. What would be illogical is to assume that because Russia might be motivated to protest for the sake of propaganda, that it is not also, or instead, motivated by not wanting to lose access to a hypothetical backdoor.
I don't completely buy the fact that he was arrested because he didn't cooperate with authorities. World Police forces have an history of infiltrating criminal groups and gaining their trust; planting backdoors isn't the only way they can investigate people.
Also, this way they're yelling loud to these people "hurry! pick another platform!".
And then, he is also on Putin's wanted list; his arrest could one day turn him into a valuable bargaining chip.
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