Actually, from everything I’ve read it doesn’t seem Cerf actually had a gun. The three students who confronted him claimed he said he had a gun and reached for his waistband, but I haven’t seen anything saying a firearm was actually recovered from the scene.

Yeah, the fact that they’re requiring people to be married by yesterday and to have been hiding out in the US for at least a decade before they can even apply to this program (and they’re still saying they’re doing a case by case review of applications, so not even everyone who meets the requirement will get it) is fucking nuts. It’s like they realized they need to do something to win back all the people they pissed off with Biden’s attacks on migrants and asylum seekers recently but this nonsense is the best they can do because they live in mortal terror of the idea that they might accidentally give an undeserving brown person legal rights.

Why did he sweep one of Trump’s turds under the rug and leave it for Reuters to clean up?

Attention should have been drawn to this. Beyond the whole “America should practice what it preaches to every other country” thing, how is someone who was exposed to our disinformation and believed it going to find out it was false if we just try to memory-hole the whole thing?

They were only talkative after the Reuters reporters showed up with evidence of their bad behavior, so it’s not like we’re dealing with whistleblowers here. Fair point that military types tend to say a lot of bullshit and don’t like to answer questions, though, which is why what really ought to happen here is a public Congressional hearing with subpoenas that force them to answer questions with their names attached to their statements. We need to know who the people who approved and implemented this were so we can make sure their careers with our military are over (or that they’re never contracted for work by our military ever again).

Seems to me like another example of shithead moderate Dems covering up for psychopathic Republicans and normalizing their shittiest policies by coming up with a bit more paperwork instead of tearing them out root and branch like most Dem voters would want them to (see also; Biden continuing Trump’s attacks on asylum and migration, Obama continuing Bush’s drone war, Clinton continuing Reagan and Bush’s attacks on welfare programs, etc.).

I would be surprised if price wasn’t the only factor and they’re just talking about employees’ health for PR reasons

Except the article also notes that Twitter didn’t remove the accounts and their posts until Reuters told them about it, presumably because the Department of Defense never told Twitter or anyone else about this program.

Biden should have informed the public about this bad behavior, publicly condemned it, and publicly held the people behind it accountable. It shouldn’t have taken investigative journalists digging quotes out of nameless sources to bring this to light if the administration were serious about preventing the spread of misinformation and not just trying to sweep an obviously dumb idea under the rug before it could blow up in their faces.

e; also, the article concludes

The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.

A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.

He had been jailed for 49 years before an Allegheny County judge granted his request for compassionate release last month.

Bozeman had been on life support. He had a back injury that had been misdiagnosed for several years, according to his lawyer, Dolly Prabhu, and he required extensive medical care after he became paralyzed from the chest down after surgery.

An aide to Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, whose office had opposed the release, said they had no comment on Bozeman’s death.

“You’re asking if we want to make a statement about the paralyzed prisoner who said he was innocent and said he got paralyzed by substandard prison medical care, and who we just argued wasn’t really that sick, who just died? … No.”

“You want to stop an execution? Of a black man?! In an election year?!! How could you be so heartless! [Faints].”

Related news scoop at NPR today, ‘Washington Post’ publisher tried to kill a story about him. It wasn’t the first time.

The Washington Post has written twice this spring about allegations that have cropped up in British court proceedings involving its new publisher and CEO, Will Lewis. In both instances Lewis pushed his newsroom chief hard not to run the story.

According to several people at the newspaper, then-Executive Editor Sally Buzbee emerged rattled from both discussions in March and in May. Lewis’ efforts were first reported by the New York Times. The second Post article in May, which was thorough and detailed, ran just days before Lewis announced his priorities for the paper, which is financially troubled.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for Lewis denied the publisher had pressured his editor, saying, “That is not true. That is not what happened.”

Buzbee did not recuse herself from the stories, which were overseen by Managing Editor Matea Gold, and drew upon reporters from three desks. Lewis did not block the story from running. He unexpectedly announced Buzbee’s departure on Sunday night, about three-and-a-half weeks after the longer story ran, along with a restructuring of the newsroom’s leadership structure.

It is not the first time that Lewis has engaged in intense efforts to head off coverage about him in ways that many U.S. journalists would consider deeply inappropriate.

…

In December, I wrote the first comprehensive piece based on new documents cited in a London courtroom alleging that Lewis had helped cover up a scandal involving widespread criminal practices at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. (Lewis has previously denied the allegations.)

At that time, Lewis had just been named publisher and CEO by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, but had not yet started. In several conversations, Lewis repeatedly — and heatedly —offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations.

At that time, the same spokesperson, who works directly for Lewis from the U.K. and has advised him since his days at the Wall Street Journal, confirmed to me that an explicit offer was on the table: drop the story, get the interview.

NPR published the story nonetheless. On Thursday, the spokesperson declined comment about that offer.

Bolding added, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240606210359/https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/nx-s1-4995105/washington-post-will-lewis-tries-to-kill-story-buzbee

Those were just the ones that were lazy enough to not bother hiding it

Oh sure, thanks for tracking me down to say that, but you don’t have anything to apologize for, it wasn’t a bad assumption if you didn’t know anything about me and made me realize how what I was doing could easily be misinterpreted and used in a way I didn’t want it to be, so I appreciated that original comment too. I’m definitely not above sticking my foot in my mouth and need people to point out when I’m doing that sometimes.

It’s actually missing from the entire article, an article which had the time to mention how there’s a group trying to have a school board member recalled (without telling us how big or small the group is, who their members are and what other organizations they’re connected to (e.g. Moms for Liberty)), list all of the group’s alleged grievances (without looking into whether any of them have any validity), and link to the group’s Facebook page (without discussing the prevalence of misinformation on those pages).

*After the first two Muslim bans were too blatantly racist for even that Supreme Court, they came up with just enough bullshit to cover their racism to get the third Muslim ban attempt to stick

I mean,

The public defender assigned to represent Jones learned that he was oxygen-deprived at birth and had a lithium deficiency — a condition linked to serious psychiatric disorders. Jones’s medical records showed that he was medicated for mood disorders, had attempted suicide and was admitted to a mental hospital.

Despite having access to this information, Jones’s attorney did not further investigate his mental health until after he was convicted.

Jones’s lawyer presented three witnesses during sentencing, including a doctor to testify about his mental health issues. Dr. Jack Potts was only able to conduct a short examination of Jones, however, so his report was less than one page of analysis. Dr. Potts advocated for more testing, but the request was denied.

Like, setting aside the death penalty in general for a second, this is just a flagrant disregard of legal precedent when it comes to legal competency and ineffective assistance of counsel.

Archive today has been called out for creepy behavior by CloudFlare, so I don’t like to use them if it can be avoided. I normally use the Internet Archive, but they have been getting paywalled by NYT recently while GhostArchive has kept working for me.

e; full disclosure, I don’t know anything about the people behind GhostArchive, and frankly I don’t know enough about computer networking yet to say if they’re doing any creepy things, so it may very well be six of one and half a dozen of the other here

It gives us something new to troll those miserable asshats over. “Interesting argument, but have you considered the fact that your candidate is a convicted felon?”

Obama doesn’t get a pass because he was a Democrat

Yes, I feel very much the same way. The data (such as it is) should all be in there, but there’s likely still a bunch of these that we don’t know about, and (from the linked article)

President Obama deserves credit for even acknowledging the existence of the targeted killing program (something his predecessor did not do), and for increasing transparency into the internal processes that purportedly guided the authorization of drone strikes.

So the numbers between administrations might not be apples to apples comparable

though I disagree with being able to call it a war since “terror” is not a peer state.

I actually agree really strongly with this one too and don’t see it mentioned that often, but, yeah, terrorist organizations are really no different than organized crime operations (other than that they’re pursuing political objectives instead of money), and they should be handled the same way (e.g. by police, not militaries).

You’re not wrong

“The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians.”