[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

There are only 9 people who they would 100% not admit was the leaker. It is one of them. Most likely Alito.

Can you imagine the blowback, rancor, etc. if they showed Alito did it?

farley3k wrote:

There are only 9 people who they would 100% not admit was the leaker. It is one of them. Most likely Alito.

Can you imagine the blowback, rancor, etc. if they showed Alito did it?

There would be no blowback. They would find some poor staffer to crucify.

But they haven't or they would have done it already.

...mostly because that staffer, upon approaching the cross, would present solid evidence that they were either told to do it, or didn't do it. I mean... Lawyers, people, these folks cover their butts.

Robear wrote:

...mostly because that staffer, upon approaching the cross, would present solid evidence that they were either told to do it, or didn't do it. I mean... Lawyers, people, these folks cover their butts.

They could be hoping that the quality of Alito's staffers are on part with Trump's lawyers.

That would be a foolish assumption. The Supreme Court is the big show. If you bring in fools to do your supporting work, you'll be losing arguments in short order.

Robear wrote:

That would be a foolish assumption. The Supreme Court is the big show. If you bring in fools to do your supporting work, you'll be losing arguments in short order.

Or you're making bizarre arguments like we have commonly seen from Thomas' office.

The Iowa GOP is laser focused on the real issues facing their constituents while fighting against big government overreach and for individual freedom which is why they're proposing that any Iowan receiving federally-financed SNAP benefits shouldn't be able to buy fresh meat or sliced cheese.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/natvYDe.png)

The GOP hates poor people so much they want to stop them from enjoying something as simple as a cheeseburger.

Can you imagine Tucker if Democrats tried regulating people eating American cheese?

i can imagine thousands for videos of white guys with guns and beards shoving cheese down their throats in "protest"

However the crux of the Iowa thing it is punishing poor people - and minorities - so evangelical Christians will love it (which is very odd since they are supposed to care for the poor and Jesus was a minority - but we all know they are hypocritical f*ckers)

The thing about this, at least about what I've seen, is that it's pretty much that well-trodden quite not about creating rules to protect an in-group, but not bind them, and to bind and out-group but not protect them.

Food stamp laws are "good" regulations because they target "those" people. But banning gas stoves is tyranny because it hits "us."

Wait, banning burgers is the Left's thing! Find your own thing to ban!

New Mexico shooting suspect shows Republicans seek a violent solution to rejection: From the Big Lie to Twitter to their families, Republicans refuse to peacefully admit that they're unpopular

The standard take on this is indisputable: This is the natural outcome of Trump's Big Lie. "What we're seeing now are the results of the way that Donald Trump opened the door," Lindsay Schubiner, programs director at the Western States Center told Vox. The conspiracy theories that led to January 6 are ongoing, and so, therefore, is the political violence they inspire.

But in another sense, the root cause of such political violence runs even deeper than that. Peña's alleged plot is the latest manifestation of a deeper and expanding malady affecting Republicans nationwide: A refusal to accept that their political views are simply unpopular.

When faced with proof that they and their ideas are being rejected, rather than reform or at least try to recast their ideas, Republicans often turn to conspiracy theories about sinister forces working against them. In the right-wing imagination, the problem could never be that people have heard their ideas and decided they just don't like them. Blame is instead put on "woke" educators or Hollywood manipulators "brainwashing" the masses. The "deep state," meanwhile, supposedly steals elections. And the "globalists" (read: Jews) somehow pull all of the strings.

This week, Kaitlyn Tiffany of the Atlantic reported on one of the funnier headaches Tesla CEO Elon Musk invited into his life by buying Twitter to cater to right-wingers: Conservative users who insist dark forces are suppressing their god-given right to way more followers. Prior to Musk's takeover, conservatives routinely insisted that their failure to see tweets go viral must be due to "shadowbanning," a mostly-imaginary practice of social media companies reducing a tweet's weight in an algorithm to hide a toxic viewpoint. Musk promised he'd stop the "shadowbanning" — which, easy enough, since it's not really a thing — but, of course, conservative Twitter users are still claiming their low engagement rates must be due to these alleged shadowbans. Tiffany writes:

Musk recently added "View" counts to the bottom of tweets, presumably with the intention of equipping users with data and giving them greater insight into whether others actually are seeing their tweets and just not liking them. This effort appeared to mostly anger people: The numbers were smaller than expected, which served as more evidence of shadowbanning.

What else are they going to do? Admit that most people just don't like them? They're no more going to admit that than Trump admits he lost the 2020 election. Instead, a conspiracy theory is plugged in to explain how unpopular right-wing accounts are actually beloved by the masses.

Watching Twitter users like "Catturd" whine that they'd be getting more retweets but for the "shadow-ban" is funny. Less so is this article from the New York Post about reactionary parents who are estranged from their children, and have chosen to blame "woke brainwashing" instead of their own bad choices. The Post, being a right-wing rag, is totally credulous in the face of stories of parents who want to hire "deprogrammers" to fix their supposedly brainwashed kids.

"I've had fights with some of my girls just because I wouldn't get myself a Rainbow pride Starbucks cup," one woman, who unconvincingly claims to be "a Democrat and a liberal," told the Post. One child hasn't spoken to her in four years and the other in a year, which she chalks up not to anything she's done, but to the kids being "politically correct."

Another woman claims that her daughter abandoned her "because we're conservatives and that we all should be against men."
If you're skeptical that you're getting the full story from these women, you should be — their children were not interviewed. (The Post says they reached out to two but got no response, which is likely not a sign of "woke brainwashing" but frustration with an overbearing mother who sicced a Rupert Murdoch-owned organization against them.) Both women tacitly admit that their daughters are lesbians while insisting homophobia is not at the center of the fight, leaving one to suspect that the fight over a Starbucks cup was not actually over a Starbucks cup. Indeed, the article glowingly quotes self-proclaimed "deprogrammer" Ted Patrick: "You've got to get these kids alone. I've snatched people from Yale." Unmentioned in the article is that another word for "snatching" is "kidnapping," or that Patrick and his clients have a long history of legal battles stemming from taking adults against their will to "cure" them of behaviors like being in a same-sex relationship or joining more liberal churches than their parents liked. He's done time in prison for this crime.
Tempting as it is to write these two off as truly deluded outliers, the truth is the New York Post ran this article because they thought a lot of readers would see sympathetic victims of "wokeness" where the rest of us see narcissistic bullies. It goes to show that, while Peña took it to a near-deadly level, the basic premise he was working under is widespread on the right. Conservatives increasingly feel emboldened to tell themselves that it's impossible that they or their ideas could be honestly rejected. Instead, they react to the word "no" like a stalker ex-boyfriend, as permission to use coercive tactics.

People who refuse to take "no" for an answer have always been a problem, of course. But in the era of Trump, that toxic behavior is being validated and mainstreamed as the standard Republican practice. Trump's narcissism is no longer just his individual psychological damage, but the systematic structure of the GOP.

It's a soothing myth, of course, to believe that your failures to persuade others are not on you, but the fault of shadowy conspiracies. But the danger is that such a belief ends up, as the frightening "deprogramming" rhetoric shows, justifying the use of force where persuasion fails. Because of this, Peña's alleged crimes cannot be dismissed as outlier violence. He is simply the logical conclusion of the increasingly standard Republican view that conservatism can never fail, but can only be failed.

"No-one wants to work anymore!"

Also, we get to treat you like this.

"An email? Lucky bastard." - employees who found out by trying to see if their keycards still worked.

Prederick wrote:

"No-one wants to work anymore!"

Also, we get to treat you like this.

of course it's email, nothing scales like email, bro.

NathanialG wrote:

Can you imagine Tucker if Democrats tried regulating people eating American cheese?

Well, whatever you imagined, he's one-upped you.

Like, he knows he's full of sh*t and willing to say anything because this is Colbert Report plagiarism.

Florida teachers told to remove books from classroom libraries or risk felony prosecution

Popular Information wrote:

Teachers in Manatee County, Florida, are being told to make their classroom libraries — and any other "unvetted" book — inaccessible to students, or risk felony prosecution. The new policy is part of an effort to comply with new laws and regulations championed by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). It is based on the premise, promoted by right-wing advocacy groups, that teachers and librarians are using books to "groom" students or indoctrinate them with leftist ideologies.

Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, told Popular Information that the policy was communicated to principals in a meeting last Wednesday. Individual schools are now in the process of informing teachers and other staff.

Teachers in Manatee County lamented the news on social media. "My heart is broken for Florida students today as I am forced to pack up my classroom library," one Manatee teacher wrote on Facebook.

...

In an interview with Popular Information, Chapman said that the policy was put into place last week in response to HB 1467, which was signed into law by DeSantis last March. That law established that teachers could not be trusted to select books appropriate for their students. Instead, the law requires:

Each book made available to students through a school district library media center or included in a recommended or assigned school or grade-level reading list must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate, regardless of whether the book is purchased, donated, or otherwise made available to students.

In Florida, school librarians are called "media specialists" and hold media specialist certificates. A rule passed by the Florida Department of Education last week states that a "library media center" includes any books made available to students, including in classrooms. This means that classroom libraries that are curated by teachers, not librarians, are now illegal.

The law requires that all library books selected be:

1. Free of pornography and material prohibited under s. 847.012.

2. Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented.

3. Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used or made available

Chapman says that school principals in Manatee County were told Wednesday that any staff member violating these rules by providing materials "harmful to minors" could be prosecuted for "a felony of the third degree." Therefore, teachers must make their classroom libraries inaccessible to students until they can establish that each book has been approved by a librarian.

In response to the policy, some teachers packed up their classroom libraries. Others covered up the books students are no longer allowed to read with construction paper.

Restoring student access to classroom libraries is a complex process. First, someone must cross-check each book in their classroom library with the district library catalog. If the book is available in the district libraries, that means it was approved by a media specialist and can be made available to students again. But any book not currently held in the district libraries must be individually evaluated and approved by a librarian.

And that's just the beginning. Materials prepared for an upcoming Manatee County School Board meeting include a 21-point list of procedures to ensure that classroom libraries comply with the new rules.

As a result, one Manatee teacher reported being forced to take Sneezy the Snowman and Dragons Love Tacos off the shelves pending review. Other teachers, fearing criminal liability, are telling students not to bring in "unvetted" books from home.

Have these dinguses ever met a librarian? Because if there's one profession in the country more consistently leftist and into freedom of information than teachers, it's gotta be librarians. In the 2000s when the Feds were getting really nosy about who'd been checking out the Quran, my local library district shrugged its shoulders and said, "weird, your new policy of pulling those records exactly corresponds with the start of our new policy to destroy those records immediately to protect our patrons' privacy. Can't turn over records that don't exist. Better luck next time, pigs."

Couple weeks of rubber-stamping and everything that was there before will be there again.

Im equally parts sad and infuriated at this. They’re f*cking books….

hbi2k wrote:

Have these dinguses ever met a librarian? Because if there's one profession in the country more consistently leftist and into freedom of information than teachers, it's gotta be librarians. In the 2000s when the Feds were getting really nosy about who'd been checking out the Quran, my local library district shrugged its shoulders and said, "weird, your new policy of pulling those records exactly corresponds with the start of our new policy to destroy those records immediately to protect our patrons' privacy. Can't turn over records that don't exist. Better luck next time, pigs."

Couple weeks of rubber-stamping and everything that was there before will be there again.

As a whole, sure. But when cut down to only "Florida librarians" my confidence drops considerably because all it honestly takes is one Podunk sh*tstain of a school district with a holy roller librarian to create what will essentially be state-wide bans because the training for the law is telling librarians to be ultra-conservative in how they review books and to avoid making available any books that other districts have banned.

How Apple Has So Far Avoided Layoffs: Lean Hiring, No Free Lunches

From its fiscal year-end in September 2019 to September 2022, Apple’s workforce grew by about 20% to approximately 164,000 full-time employees. Meanwhile, over roughly the same period, the employee count at Amazon doubled, Microsoft’s rose 53%, Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s increased 57% and Facebook owner Meta’s ballooned 94%.
The last big round of layoffs at Apple happened way back in 1997, when co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the company, which then cut costs by firing 4,100 employees.

So Apple probably hired fewer net people, but comes out looking better because it also means not having to put employees through the emotional stress of not knowing how secure their job is.

I'm curious to see how many teachers leave Florida school systems after this school year. I cannot imagine that Florida is paying them enough to put up with all this BS.

Robear wrote:

I'm curious to see how many teachers leave Florida school systems after this school year. I cannot imagine that Florida is paying them enough to put up with all this BS.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/AgBeLEQ.jpg)

The problem then is keeping the system's county and state accreditations. They'd have to staff up heavily in the summer and that could be a real issue. I bet this becomes a big deal later in the Spring.

[quote="OG_slinger"]Florida teachers told to remove books from classroom libraries or risk felony prosecution

Popular Information wrote:

The law requires that all library books selected be:

2. Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented.

Fiction has no need so there are no fiction books that will ever be approved. And the concept of ability to comprehend material would be laughably vague except it can be used to strike down practically anything.

farley3k wrote:

And the concept of ability to comprehend material would be laughably vague except it can be used to strike down practically anything.

Well, that's kinda the point of the law: give cover for the knuckle-draggers who want to ban any book that mentions race or anything except cishet relationships.

A Florida teacher has been trying to get hundreds of books banned including When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball, a book about the childhood of Wilma Rudolph, a legendary sprinter who won three gold medals at the 1960 Olympic games in Rome.

But because Rudolph was Black and part of her story was overcoming racial discrimination in the 50s and 60s the teacher decided the book should be removed because it promotes "race baiting," "trashes and puts down those who are not black," and is "very anti-white."

Robear wrote:

The problem then is keeping the system's county and state accreditations. They'd have to staff up heavily in the summer and that could be a real issue. I bet this becomes a big deal later in the Spring.

Didnt they set it up so that almost anyone could be a teacher in FL? It might not be as hard as other places.