Shark Week  🌻 🌻 🌻

Shark Week: Just another ordinary Independence Day holiday weekend: fireworks, multiple mass shootings and a once maybe future president posting a F-ck Biden flag.  The founders would be so proud.  To set the tone for the weekend several Republican presidential candidates including Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Asa Hutchinson spoke at the Moms for Liberty conference.  Don’t be fooled by the innocent name, we’re not talking apple pie, Moms for Liberty is anything but, it’s a far-right organization that was founded by two Florida mothers in opposition to COVID related health regulations that has expanded its mission to oppose racially and LGTBQ inclusive school curriculums.  The group also advocates for book bans because teaching the history of slavery and learning about things like the civil rights movement and the Holocaust also pollute children’s minds One of its chapters has a quote from Hitler on its website and continues to defend that it’s there insisting that the quote is a good one so of course they have to attribute it to its source.  The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Moms for Liberty to be an extremist hate group which goes far to explaining why so many Republican presidential candidates, even Asa Hutchinson who is one of those who has positioned himself as an alternative to Trump and Trumpism, felt compelled to speak at their conference.   

The Courts: There was lots of action at Wimbledon but also a few more notable Supreme Court decisions that will have a more lasting impact than Venus crashing out early.  As expected, along ideological lines, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, the Colorado website designer who should she ever start making wedding websites doesn’t want to make any for same sex couples. Ignoring the odd facts surrounding the case, the Court ruled that forcing her to do so would violate her First Amendment rights. We’re all supposed to believe that the Lorie Smith case will only affects things like creative website design and won’t lead to discrimination against other groups or individuals that offend her and other like-minded folks but don’t be surprised when the next cake or website designer refuses another group of what they consider to be morally offensive clients. The Court also killed Biden’s plan to cancel or reduce student loan debt. Biden responded to that ruling with a new plan that will probably also be shot down at some future date.  Carrying on with the First Amendment theme, on Tuesday Louisiana federal district judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, something that shouldn’t matter but unfortunately does, ruled that the Biden administration likely violated it by censoring unfavorable views on social media over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, calling those efforts which involved the administration encouraging social media companies to call out vaccine misinformation and election lies for what they were “Orwellian.”  The judge issued a “sweeping” preliminary injunction barring numerous federal officials and agencies including Surgeon General Murthy, HHS Secretary Becerra, Press Secretary Jean-Pierre and all employees of the Justice Department and FBI from having almost any contact with social media firms.  No doubt the DOJ will be appealing but, in the meantime, expect to see lots more crazy stuff posted on social media. By the way, RFK Jr who’s extreme anti vaxx posts had been banned from most social media cites at least until he declared his run for the presidency at which point, they were allowed back on, celebrated the decision which tells you a lot about why both he and the decision are very problematic.

Social Diss Media:  Elon Musk’s blue bird had a really rough weekend. It’s not clear why, but he restricted use of his Twitter platform this weekend, particularly to those who don’t pay for blue checkmarks, the group that makes up most of Twitters user base while also blocking all those users who don’t have their own accounts.  He insisted that he had to impose usage limitations to stop content “scraping” by artificial intelligence companies who he alleged were using Twitter content, and overwhelming its increasingly fragile infrastructure, to boost their capabilities. Most of the tech universe suspect that Twitter’s real problems have something to do with a bug that his skeleton engineer crew couldn’t quickly fix or maybe even cutbacks in web hosting associated with his failure to pay hosting fees.  Whatever the cause new CEO Linda Yaccarino who was brought on board to boost advertising revenues can’t be happy because cutting post views is hardly something that the mainstream advertisers that she is supposed to lure back to Twitter want to see. Then again, many of those same advertisers probably aren’t all that pleased with the Louisiana judge’s ruling either because having ads posted next to election lies and vaccine misinformation isn’t exactly a good thing. In other social media news, the SPAC that still plans to acquire Trump’s Digital company, including Truth Social, agreed to an $18 million settlement with the SEC. Their offense, prematurely holding merger talks with Trump’s company.  Naturally, at least so far, no penalty for Teflon Trump.      

And: Senator Lindsey Graham who has spent the past of the past six years kowtowing to Trump was booed by a scarily large group at a Trump rally in his home state. Sad for Lindsey and very sad for the rest of us that so many showed up to hear Trump push his lies and hate, not to mention his promises to go after his “opponents” in the FBI and the DOJ not to mention his other promise to end the war in Ukraine on day one and we know how he’d do that.   Also, a wee bit disconcerting for presidential wannabees South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley who need those voters to have any chance of winning their state’s primary.  Two other pieces of news that are worth following.  Yesterday, Kremlin spokesmen Dmitri Peskov hinted that some could be up on the Evan Gershkovich front, suggesting that a prisoner swap of some kind could be in the works.  Great if true.  Also, some white powder AKA cocaine was found at the West Wing of the White House.  Hundreds of people pass through that area regularly, but naturally right-wing media immediately pointed the finger at Hunter Biden.  We may never know who left their coke, and it could turn out that it was Hunter but the rush to judgement, especially by press outlets like the NY Post is not surprising but still ugly.