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[Frumple]

One of the fun parts of it is, well... trump's currently awaiting sentencing for nearly three dozen felony charges. Breaking more laws in the process? Not a great idea on a number of levels, heh.

No clue if anything's going to actually come of it, but it'd be a hell of a thing if that ended up aggravating his sentences.

[lemon10]

After a certain point it doesn't really matter if you commit more crimes. Trump already has so many trailing after him that if he doesn't win the election he's screwed. If he wins on the other hand all the crimes won't matter.

I do agree that this was a dumb move, but I would be *real* surprised if it changed the opinion of basically any of his supporters.

[Folly]

I'm sure that his supporters will love it. Trump visits graveyard to honor fallen soldiers and pathetic liberals try to twist it into something bad because they are losing badly and desperately grasping at straws to try and turn things around.

[Lord Shonus]

Big interview tonight. I halfway expect it to go off the rails, and halfway expect it to be steered in a self-harming direction. What I'm hoping is that Harris displays a firm grasp of policy in a way that does not alienate the high-information voters in the party, while also failing to push away those hoping the new centrist direction is rightward. This is likely a high bar, which is suitable to the office.

We're unlikely to see more than platitudes from Harris until after the election, for the simple reason that Broad Statements Of Principle are much harder to attack if the principles are popular.

[anewaname]

Gwen Walz makes campaign stop in Virginia. She is easy to see as a person who seeks to improve community rather than control it, and her efforts will inspire capable volunteers to organize voter outreach.

[StrawBarrel]

Couples say they can't get married because of the outdated rules of Social Security's Supplemental Security Income program. : NPR
June 20, 20245:25 PM ET
Joseph Shapiro

Social Security. History of legal discrimination via eugenics

Earlier this month, Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley called for raising the asset limit. Bipartisan legislation before Congress would do that, high enough to effectively end the marriage penalty. (Another bill would end a marriage penalty for a smaller number of disabled adults who get Social Security benefits.)

Bills to raise asset limits have stalled, partly because of cost. Social Security’s actuaries estimate that raising the limit to $10,000 would add $9.8 billion to the program over 10 years because more people would become eligible for benefits.

Kathleen Romig has written that the cost would be justified because by raising the asset limit to $10,000 for an individual and $20,000 for couples more people would qualify for SSI and keep their benefits, and that would make it easier for Social Security to administer the program.

Romig recently went to work as a senior advisor for O’Malley. When she spoke to NPR, she was at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in charge of Social Security and disability policy.

Marriage, Romig notes, wasn’t expected of people with significant disabilities in the early 1970s.

In fact, sometimes it was even illegal.

Romig remembers that when she applied for a marriage license in 2004 in Michigan, she was required to attest that she was not “an idiot or an imbecile, it literally said that.” Those, she notes, were already offensive words by then.

But a law still existed in Michigan — first passed in 1846 and expanded in 1905 — that made it a felony for someone to marry if they were “insane,” an “idiot,” an “imbecile” or “feeble-minded."

The law in Michigan, and similar ones in more than 40 states, came from a period of belief in eugenics, a since discredited scientific and racist theory that certain groups of people were genetically superior and that others should be restricted or discouraged from having children. Disabled people, under laws that reflected those values, were taken from families and isolated in institutions. Disabled women — an estimated 70,000— were forcibly sterilized.

As times have changed, SSI did not, Romig notes. “SSI is stuck in the past,” she says.

Gabriella Garbero’s experience with discrimination

Gabriella Garbero, a St. Louis lawyer who would like to marry her long-time partner, notes that while SSI’s policy doesn’t prohibit disabled people from marrying, it does penalize marriage. She compares that “exclusion” to the way other marginalized groups were once blocked from marriage, like same-sex and interracial couples.

That disabled people still get penalized, she argues, sends a negative message — to disabled people on SSI like her and to people without disabilities — that disabled people are “just mooching off of government … just an expense, not a population that has dreams and hopes and wants and needs, just like everybody else.”

Couples say they can't get married because of this government program's outdated rules
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/g-s1-4991
Audio Mirror 1: https://www.kuow.org/stories/how-an-outdated-social-security-policy-is-preventing-couples-from-marrying
Audio Mirror 2: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/all-things-considered-1383542/episodes/how-an-outdated-social-securit-213665203

SHAPIRO: To pay on her own would run more than $200,000 a year. Private insurance, the kind you get through your job, won't pay for it. So to keep her Medicaid, the woman needs to stay eligible for SSI. But that's not easy because the program's rules are so complicated and out of date. One of SSI's rusty rules is that to qualify, you can't have more than $2,000 in savings and other assets or $3,000 for a couple. Those numbers haven't budged since 1989.

[anewaname]

About four years ago, a cease and desist was sent by the estate of Isaac Hayes to trump to stop trump from using the music. Today, the estate of Isaac Hayes won an injunction blocking new use of his music while the case continues. The judge did not force trump's campaign to take down existing videos. The estate is also seeking about $3 million for uses between 2020 and 2022.

[MaxTheFox]

3 million bucks for someone of his magnitude... in Russian we have an expression, "что слону дробина". "Like birdshot to an elephant"

[hector13]

He did get a massive fine for cheating on his business expenses.

However, Isaac Hayes (or his estate anyway) aren’t the only musicians complaining he plays their music at his rallies and such like. I’m not sure I would complain if this started a torrent of similar lawsuits.

[Starver]

Recently Abba also complained, and previously (to my knowledge) Adele, Celine Dion, Foo Fighters, REM, The Rolling Stones and (the estate of) Sinead O'Connor. Doubtless others have been played who would ideally not want to be associated, as well as others who definitely would and would even turn up as an "interval act", if asked.

There may be a mismatch between expectations, with a relevent performing-rights licence granting whole swathes of music to political rallies unless explicitly withdrawn. But it's also clear that venues/teams involved don't always check that choices are actually in that particular block-licence (it might be that an artist was available for a non-political event, and the fine details might have been assumed dealt with at a different level).

Any 'pre-denial' use probably has no comeback (the Foo Fighters may have earnt royalties, by eventual trickle-down through the usual system of performance-payments, which they said they'd then donate to the Harris campaign), but using after both technical and legal barring would definitely be more direct financial+legal jeopardy. Reputationally, it might help or hinder. Depends upon your viewpoint of the offender, or indeed the offended-against.


(For some music, political opinions may vastly differ between the performers involved. If extant contracts and IP ownerships make it not ultimately a single person's decision, as it's likely, then either the banning or encouraging of any material's use might be extra complicated. And rights in the US may be packaged and managed/authorised differently from elsewhere in the world, especially with intrinsically non-US performers.)

[McTraveller]

“Nippon still has not provided any true guarantees that our jobs, wages or benefits will be protected beyond the expiration of our current agreements in 2026,” said a union statement last month."

How much can a company make a guarantee on future demand (and future revenue)? Sure a company should be doing their best to make good forecasts and to set aside enough of present revenue to fund benefit obligations.  The present administration as well as the Trump campaign are both saying "we should not sell this US company to a foreign entity" but how would that help?

How could the government help the employees and the company transition to remain viable in a changed global steel industry?  I'm curious about what programs could even be set up that don't have unintended consequences.  I suppose you could do what some foreign countries are accused of doing, which is just printing money to pay people to keep making things for which there is no demand, but that is setting things up for future disaster.  Could some kind of fund for industry transition be set up?

I think unemployment insurance was intended to kind of do this, but in practice it doesn't; people don't seem to use unemployment insurance en masse to transition between industries, nor is the insurance able to explicitly provide the things someone would need to make such a transition (that is, it just provides money, but if there are no affordable training programs, then what good is that money?).

I wonder what kind of policies could be made to help the economy be more flexible, rather than trying to "protect" existing industries and keep them going when there is no demand.  The US culture to date seems to be just try and let "the invisible hand" sort it out, but that is really painful for many individuals even though the "average" economy does handle it.  So either we keep the "just in time" philosophy of operating with no margin, and prices are low, or we accept things costing more (directly or indirectly through taxes) to provide a reserve buffer.

Presently our policies don't really have a reserve buffer; even our "reserves" are just-in-time in that they are funded by present tax revenue so that if there's a drastic enough shock then those reserves fail.  And in fact, some political groups see a surplus and scream, because they see that as "waste", when having a surplus is literally, physically, the only way to mitigate a supply disruption - especially when such a supply cannot be ramped quickly.

[anewaname]

A DOJ article (which contains a link to the indictment pdf). Two employees of the Russian Today business are being charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

From the pdf:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. RT, formerly known as "Russia Today," is a state-controlled media outlet funded
and directed by the Government of Russia. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, RT
was sanctioned, dropped by distributors, and ultimately forced to cease formal operations in the
United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In response, RT created, in
the words of its editor-in-chief, an "entire empire of covert projects" designed to shape public
opinion in "Western audiences." One of RT's "covert projects," as described herein, is its funding
and direction of a Tennessee-based online content creation company ("U.S. Company-I ")

From the article:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Between in or about October 2023 and in or about August 2024, RT sent wire transfers to U.S. Company-1 totaling approximately $9.7 million, which represented nearly 90% of U.S. Company-1’s bank deposits from all sources combined. The wires were sent from shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Mauritius, and were often accompanied by wire notes ascribing the payments to the purchase of electronics. For example, the wire note for a $318,800 wire payment from a shell entity in Turkey to U.S. Company-1 on March 1, read: “BUYING GOODS-INV.013-IPHONE 15 PRO MAX 512GB.”

U.S. Company-1 never disclosed to its viewers that it was funded and directed by RT. Nor did U.S. Company-1 or its two founders register with the Attorney General as an agent of a foreign principal.

So, the company that hosts a bunch of US-based podcasts gets 90% of its above-board incoming cash from Putin's propaganda machine. This will create interesting times in the podcasting world.

Edit: And from an MSNBC interview with some cyber guy:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Interviewee: IF THE RUSSIANS ARE GOING TO DROP 10 MILLION INTO A SINGLE OUTLET FOR A FEW MILLION VIEWS, I'VE GOT TO EXPECT THEY'VE GOT 100 MILLION-PLUS MORE THAT IS DISTRIBUTED SOMEWHERE ELSE.
Interviewer:  RIGHT. THIS IS THE FIRST SHOE TO DROP,

[Strongpoint]

I am shocked. Shocked! What next? Will they find peaces of Chinese, Iranian and Qatari propaganda networks next?

[Duuvian]

I ran into something I thought might be related to podcasts a few months ago. I found this article and searched the author, Christopher S Chivvis.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/20/ukraine-nato-membership

I found that there is a lady with the same last name who IIRC early on helped set up and popularize the podcast ecosystem, though I can't find a bookmark for that article so it probably was in the folder I emptied out. I dismissed this as nothing and deleted some of the bookmarks I had as I wasn't very confident I wasn't jumping to wrong conclusions about the podcast (as it's own ecosystem) nonsense. The reason I deleted the bookmarks I was keeping in a more accusationally named folderis because I couldn't determine if the shared last name is due to marriage or relation, or if it is a fluke. If that had been a link I would have spent more time on reading about it.

Here is my folder for this before I hit a dead end. Foldernotes are often conjecture and help me remember why I bookmark things.

Podcast Nonsense (main folder)

https://muckrack.com/dana-chivvis

Spoiler: foldernote for above link (click to show/hide)

(foldernote: helped start up the podcast ecosystem. Shares last name with a former officer who is spouting what may be Russian disinfo. If they are related and it's not a fluke that may be a serious thing)

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/christopher-s-chivvis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_American_Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(podcast)

Links to New York Times (subfolder1)

https://www.nytimes.com/by/dana-chivvis

Appearance of foreign influence campaign (subfolder 1)

Links previously deleted due to dead end on whether these two are connected or not, so it was an empty subfolder when I went back to check the folder.

[McTraveller]

I doubt there is a material difference between "domestic" and "foreign" influence campaign anyway.

Does it really matter where the money or ideas originate? Shouldn't the ideas be judged on merit, not source?  Heresy, I know...