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#mike lee
odinsblog · 9 days
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When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion smugly declared that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Alito mocked the dissent’s concern that getting rid of abortion would ultimately imperil things like access to contraception, saying the dissent was “designed to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights.”
But as anti-choice politicians and activists are now deploying Dobbs to try to roll back decades of law about bodily autonomy, it’s clear the dissent’s fears were quite well-founded.
Conservatives are not going to stop at unwinding the constitutional right to privacy, which underpins things like the right to obtain birth control and the right of same-sex couples to marry. After they destroy the agency of half the population by imposing so-called “fetal personhood” laws, they’re coming for the modern welfare state.
The blueprint
Over at the hard-right Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll, a former comms person for both the Heritage Foundation and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, has a lengthy list of laws he’d like to get rid of — everything from Medicaid, to Head Start, to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Those laws, he argues, “penalize marriage and encourage alternative family formation.” Carroll’s goals therefore dovetail not only with forced-birth conservatives but also with forced-marriage conservatives.
(continue reading)
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saywhat-politics · 1 year
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U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) are actively spreading anti-Ukraine disinformation, posting to Twitter a deceptively-edited video of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which they falsely claim means the Ukrainian President wants America’s “sons and daughters” to die defending Ukraine.
Senator Lee complained his personal Twitter account was suspended at some point after he retweeted the video. It was recently restored and his post with the deceptively-edited video has not been removed.
The original Twitter sources of the video have warning labels that Greene and Lee appear to have ignored before posting. Greene posted it to her official U.S. government Twitter account.
That warning, in the form of a readers’ note, says: “This quote is taken out of context. The full quote is :’If Ukraine loses, Russia is going to enter Baltic states, NATO states, then the U.S will have to send their sons and daughters exactly in the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war’.”
The Associated Press also published a fact check on Wednesday noting the deceptively-edited video is “missing context.” The AP states: “He was not suggesting Americans would have to fight in Ukraine.”
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mysharona1987 · 1 year
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To save the news, shatter ad-tech
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I’m coming to the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in HAY-ON-WYE with my novel Red Team Blues:
Sun (May 28), 1130h: The AI Enigma
Mon (May 29), 12h: Danger and Desire at the Frontier
I’m at OXFORD’s Blackwell’s on May 29 at 7:30PM with Tim Harford.
Then it’s Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, and Berlin!
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Big Tech steals from news, but what it steals isn’t content. Talking about the news isn’t theft, and neither is linking to it, or excerpting it. But stealing money? That’s definitely theft.
Big Tech steals money from the news media. 51% of every ad-dollar is claimed by a tech intermediary, a middleman that squats on a chokepoint between advertisers and publishers. Two companies — Google and Meta — dominate this sector, and both of these companies are “full-stack” — which is cutesy techspeak for “vertical monopoly.”
Here’s what that means: when an advertiser wants to place an ad, it contracts with the “demand-side platform” (DSP) to seek out a chance to put an ad in front of a user based on nonconsensually gathered surveillance data about a potential customer.
The DSP contacts an ad-exchange — a marketplace where advertisers bid against each other to cram their ads into the eyeballs of a user based on surveillance data matches.
The ad-exchange receives a constant stream of chances to place ads. This stream is generated by the “supply-side platform” (SSP), a service that represents publishers who want to sell ads.
Meta/Facebook and Google both the “full stack” of ads: they represent buyers and sellers, and they operate the marketplace. When the sale closes, Googbook collects a commission from the advertiser, another from the publisher, and a fee for running the market. And of course, Google and Facebook are both publishers and advertisers.
This is like a stock exchange where one company operates the exchange, while serving as broker and underwriter for every stock bought or sold, while owning huge amounts of stock in many of the listed companies as well as owning the largest companies on the exchange outright.
It’s like a realtor representing the buyer and the seller, while buying and selling millions of homes for its own purposes, bidding against its buyers and also undercutting its sellers, in an opaque auction that only it can see.
It’s a single lawyer representing both parties in a divorce, while serving as judge in divorce court, while trying to match one of the divorcing parties on Tinder.
It’s incredibly dirty. These companies gobble up the majority of every ad dollar in commissions and other junk fees, and they say it’s because they’re just really danged good at buying and selling ads. Forgive me if I sound cynical, but I think it’s a lot more likely that they’re good at cheating.
We could try to make them stop cheating with a bunch of rules about how a company with this kind of gross conflict of interest should conduct itself. But enforcing those rules would be hard — merely detecting cheating would be hard. A simpler — and more effective — approach is to simply remove the conflict of interest.
Writing on EFF’s Deeplinks blog this week, I explain how the AMERICA Act — introduced by Senator Mike Lee, with bipartisan cosponsors from Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz (!) — can do just that:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech
The AMERICA Act would require the largest ad-tech companies to sell off two of their three ad-tech divisions — they could be a buyer’s agent, a seller’s agent or a marketplace — but not all three (not even two!). This is in keeping with a well-established principle in antitrust law: “structural separation,” the idea that a company can be a platform owner, or a platform user, but not both.
In the heyday of structural separation, railroad companies were banned from running freight companies that competed with the firms that shipped freight on their rails. Likewise, banks were banned from owning companies that competed with the businesses they loaned money to. Basically, the rule said, “If you want to be the ref in this game, you can’t own one of the teams”:
https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2021/02/what-att-breakup-teaches-us-about-big-tech-breakup
Structural separation acknowledges that some conflicts of interest are so consequential and so hard to police that they shouldn’t exist at all. A judge won’t hear a case if they know one of the litigants — and certainly not if they have a financial stake in the outcome of the case.
The ad-tech duopoly controls a massive slice of the ad market, and holds in its hands the destiny of much of the news and other media we enjoy and rely on. Under the AMERICA Act’s structural separation rule, the obvious, glaring conflicts of interest that dominate big ad-tech companies would be abolished.
The AMERICA Act also regulates smaller ad-tech platforms. Companies with $5–20b in turnover would have a duty to “act in the best interests of their customers, including by making the best execution for bids on ads,” and maintain transparent systems that are designed to facilitate third-party auditing. If a single company operated brokerages serving both buyers and sellers, it would need to create firewalls between both sides of the business, and would face stiff penalties for failures to uphold their customers’ interests.
EFF’s endorsement of the AMERICA Act is the first of four proposals we’re laying out in a series on saving news media from Big Tech. We introduced those proposals last week in a big “curtain raiser” post:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
Next week, we’ll publish our proposal for using privacy law to kill surveillance ads, replacing them with “context ads” that let publishers — not ad-tech — control the market.
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Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Hay-on-Wye, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act
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EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery. All the icons except for 'break-up ad-tech' are greyed out.
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Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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porterdavis · 2 years
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Why is a junior senator from Utah so friendly to Russia?
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liberaleffects · 1 year
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https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger
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taf-art · 6 months
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In the City of Dreams (2022). Mike Lee.
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luckyacid · 8 months
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Mike Lee Mother, 2021 Oil on canvas 13 x 10 in
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meandmybigmouth · 1 year
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kp777 · 11 months
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By Alexander Bolton
The Hill
April 25, 2023
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) on Tuesday blocked a request by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to allow 184 military promotions to move forward over his objection to the Pentagon’s recently enacted abortion policy.
Tuberville’s protest of the Defense Department’s policy of providing leave and reimbursing some expenses for service members who must travel to obtain abortions has held up a range of military promotions for months, and the first-term senator is vowing not to back down anytime soon.  
“One senator is personally standing in the way of promotions for 184 of our top-level military leaders. One senator is holding up pay raises for men and women in uniform. One senator is blocking key senior military leaders from taking their posts. One senator is jeopardizing America’s national security,” Warren said on the floor.  
Read more.
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gwydionmisha · 1 year
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tvserie-film · 7 months
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Title: Even Unto Death (2013)
Author: Mike Lee
Not a horrible story but at the beginning it struggled to capture me and only towards the end did it give its best. The ending felt like a 90's action movie
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saywhat-politics · 1 month
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(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk told US Republican senators “there is no way in hell” that Russian President Vladimir Putin could lose the war on Ukraine, weighing in on a conflict that has been affected by Musk’s own Starlink satellite services.
Musk, the billionaire chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., made the comments in a forum Monday on X Spaces, part of his X social media platform. The discussions included opponents of a Senate bill that would provide further assistance for Ukraine to continue battling the full-scale Russian invasion that began two years ago.
He was joined by Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, JD Vance of Ohio and Mike Lee of Utah, as well as Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, and David Sacks, a co-founder of Craft Ventures LLC.
Musk’s comments came as he agreed with Johnson’s statement that Putin would not lose in Ukraine. Johnson said those who expect a Ukraine victory were “living in a fantasy world.”
“We gotta kill this thing,” Vance said of the $95 billion measure, which includes $60 billion in assistance for Ukraine as well as funding for Israel, Taiwan, and humanitarian aid for Gaza.
Musk added he hoped Americans would contact their elected representatives about the Ukraine bill. “This spending does not help Ukraine. Prolonging the war does not help Ukraine.”
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mysharona1987 · 11 months
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Irony is: the woman isn’t even supportive of her child: She told the story in the context of trying to talk the kid out of transitioning and come back to the church.
But just being related to a trans person is enough to set these people off. Regardless of your views on the topic.
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thehalfwaypost · 2 years
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tomorrowusa · 1 year
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Somebody please call maintenance. The Republican Party needs to be scraped off the wall.
The GOP has been wanting to kill Social Security since the 1930s and Medicare since the 1960s. They often assert this. But when they get caught saying so out loud, they deny everything and try to change the subject.
President Joe Biden (AKA: “Dark Brandon”) conducted a clinic on owning rich Republicans the day after his State of the Union.
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Sen. Rick Scott is one of the odious Republicans currently afflicting Florida. He used to run a large insurance company; in that capacity he was responsible for HÜGELY defrauding Medicare.
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Rick Scott, who is filthy rich, wants to take granny’s Social Security away so he can line his own pockets with loot even more.
Medicare is linked to Social Security. Get rid of Social Security and out goes Medicare too. Many progressives favor “Medicare for all”. Many wealthy Trump Republicans favor “Medicare for none”.
Don’t be timid about reminding older relatives about Republicans’ longstanding ambition to ax Social Security.
Republicans Are Angry at Joe Biden for Accurately Describing Plan to Sunset Social Security
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