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Category Archives: Viva!
Op-Ed Columnist: G.O.P. to Americans With Health Problems: Drop Dead
Republican cruelty is a pre-existing condition.
Major Study of Drinking Will Be Shut Down
Pimping for profits knows no bounds An internal investigation at the National Institutes of Health concluded that the $100 million trial had been tainted by unauthorized contacts with the alcohol industry.
Ajit Pai Rushes to Aid Sinclair Before Court Can Kill Merger –
Pimping for profits after he is out of government

FCC boss Ajit Pai is rushing to approve Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $4 billion acquisition of Tribune before a court ruling can scuttle the deal. Pai is already facing a corruption probe by the nonpartisan FCC Inspector General amidst allegations he coordinated the elimination of decades-old media consolidation rules simply to help Sinclair. The rules, which have long had bipartisan support, are designed to protect smaller competitors and local news stations from being obliterated by media giants like Sinclair, whose news has been widely ridiculed as misleading on a good day.
Undaunted, Pai is rushing forward with several additional rule changes allowing the merger to proceed, with the hopes of beating a looming court challenge to the punch.
One of Pai’s moves included restoring an obscure loophole known as the UHF Discount. The rule was discarded a few years ago by the FCC for being largely useless. But Pai rushed to restore it because it lets Sinclair falsely claim that its overall post-merger reach is much smaller than it actually is, letting the company duck underneath limits on just how large one broadcaster can get.
A panel of appellate judges is currently considering a challenge to Pai’s decision to reinstate the obscure rule, but Pai is clearly trying to help Sinclair’s merger gain approval before the court ruling can come down. As such, he’s scheduled a a July 12 vote on further altering rules that cap broadcasters reach at 39 percent of the national audience. Sinclair, meanwhile is engaging in all manner of tricks to try and further reduce its perceived footprint, including proposing selling off some stations to companies still tied to Sinclair, often via notable sweetheart deals for some involved in the shell game.
In short, Pai continues to gut decades-old media consolidation rules specifically to aid Sinclair. While under investigation for…corruption allegations that he’s specifically trying to aid Sinclair.
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Facebook’s Screening for Political Ads Nabs News Sites Instead of Politicians
by Jeremy B. Merrill and Ariana Tobin
One ad couldn’t have been more obviously political. Targeted to people aged 18 and older, it urged them to “vote YES” on June 5 on a ballot proposition to issue bonds for schools in a district near San Francisco. Yet it showed up in users’ news feeds without the “paid for by” disclaimer required for political ads under Facebook’s new policy designed to prevent a repeat of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Nor does it appear, as it should, in Facebook’s new archive of political ads.
The other ad was from The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet, promoting one of its articles about financial aid for college students. Yet Facebook’s screening system flagged it as political. For the ad to run, The Hechinger Report would have to undergo the multi-step authorization and authentication process of submitting Social Security numbers and identification that Facebook now requires for anyone running “electoral ads” or “issue ads.”
Help Us Monitor Political Ads
ProPublica needs your help holding Facebook’s political ad system accountable. Please download our tool to catch ads Facebook is missing.
When The Hechinger Report appealed, Facebook acknowledged that its system should have allowed the ad to run. But Facebook then blocked another ad from The Hechinger Report, about an article headlined, “DACA students persevere, enrolling at, remaining in, and graduating from college.” This time, Facebook rejected The Hechinger Report’s appeal, maintaining that the text or imagery was political.
As these examples suggest, Facebook’s new screening policies to deter manipulation of political ads are creating their own problems. The company’s human reviewers and software algorithms are catching paid posts from legitimate news organizations that mention issues or candidates, while overlooking straightforwardly political posts from candidates and advocacy groups. Participants in ProPublica’s Facebook Political Ad Collector project have submitted 40 ads that should have carried disclaimers under the social network’s policy, but didn’t. Facebook may have underestimated the difficulty of distinguishing between political messages and political news coverage — and the consternation that failing to do so would stir among news organizations.
The rules require anyone running ads that mention candidates for public office, are about elections, or that discuss any of 20 “national issues of public importance” to verify their personal Facebook accounts and add a “paid for by” disclosure to their ads, which are to be preserved in a public archive for seven years. Advertisers who don’t comply will have their ads taken down until they undergo an “authorization” process, submitting a Social Security number, driver’s license photo, and home address, to which Facebook sends a letter with a code to confirm that anyone running ads about American political issues has an American home address. The complication is that the 20 hot-button issues — environment, guns, immigration, values foreign policy, civil rights and the like — are likely to pop up in posts from news organizations as well.
“This could be really confusing to consumers because it’s labelling news content as political ad content,” said Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.
An ad from The Hechinger Report to promote an article about financial aid for college students was flagged as political by Facebook and prevented from running.
The Hechinger Report joined trade organizations representing thousands of publishers this week in protesting this policy, arguing that the filter lumps their stories in with the very organizations and issues they are covering, thus confusing readers already wary of “fake news.” Some publishers — including larger outlets like New York Media, which owns New York Magazine — have stopped advertising on the platform.
“When it comes to news, Facebook still doesn’t get it. In its efforts to clear up one bad mess, it seems set on joining those who want blur the line between reality-based journalism and propaganda,” Mark Thompson, chief executive officer of The New York Times, said in prepared remarks at the Open Markets Institute on Tuesday.
In a statement Wednesday, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, said the company recognized “that news content was different from political and issue advertising,” and promised to create a “differentiated space within our archive to separate news content from political and issue ads.” But Brown rejected the publishers’ request for a “whitelist” of legitimate news organizations whose ads would not be considered political.
“Removing an entire group of advertisers, in this case publishers, would go against our transparency efforts and the work we’re doing to shore up election integrity on Facebook,” she wrote. “We don’t want to be in a position where a bad actor obfuscates its identity by claiming to be a news publisher.” Many of the foreign agents that bought ads to sway the 2016 presidential election, the company has said, posed as journalistic outlets.
Her response didn’t satisfy news organizations. Facebook “continues to characterize professional news and opinion as ‘advertising’ — which is both misguided and dangerous,” said David Chavern, chief executive of the News Media Alliance — a trade association representing 2,000 news organizations in the U.S. and Canada —and co-author of an open letter to Facebook on June 11.
ProPublica asked Facebook to explain its decision to block 14 advertisements shared with us by news outlets. Of those, 12 were ultimately rejected as political content, one was overturned on appeal, and one Facebook could not locate in its records. Most of these publications, including The Hechinger Report, are affiliated with the Institute for Nonprofit News, a consortium of mostly small nonprofit newsrooms that produce primarily investigative journalism (ProPublica is a member).
Here are a few examples of news organization ads that were rejected as political:
- Voice of Monterey Bay tried to boost an interview with labor leader Dolores Huerta headlined “She Still Can.” After the ad ran for about a day, Facebook sent an alert that the ad had been turned off. The outlet is refusing to seek approval for political ads, “since we are a news organization,” said Julie Martinez, co-founder of the nonprofit news site.
- Ensia tried to advertise an article headlined: “Opinion: We need to talk about how logging in the Southern U.S. is harming local residents.” It was rejected as political. Ensia will not appeal or buy new ads until Facebook addresses the issue, said senior editor David Doody.
- inewssource tried to promote a post about a local candidate, headlined: “Scott Peters’ Plea to Get San Diego Unified Homeless Funding Rejected.” The ad was rejected as political. Inewssource appealed successfully, but then Facebook changed its mind and rejected it again, a spokeswoman for the social network said.
- BirminghamWatch tried to boost a post about a story headlined, “‘That is Crazy:’ 17 Steps to Cutting Checks for Birmingham Neighborhood Projects.” The ad was rejected as political and rejected again on appeal. A little while later, BirminghamWatch’s advertiser on the account received a message from Facebook: “Finish boosting your post for $15, up to 15,000 people will see it in NewsFeed and it can get more likes, comments, and shares.” The nonprofit news site appealed again, and the ad was rejected again.
For most of its history, Facebook treated political ads like any other ads. Last October, a month after disclosing that “inauthentic accounts … operated out of Russia” had spent $100,000 on 3,000 ads that “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages,” the company announced it would implement new rules for election ads. Then in April, it said the rules would also apply to issue-related ads.
The policy took effect last month, at a time when Facebook’s relationship with the news industry was already rocky. A recent algorithm change reduced the number of posts from news organizations that users see in their news feed, thus decreasing the amount of traffic many media outlets can bring in without paying for wider exposure, and frustrating publishers who had come to rely on Facebook as a way to reach a broader audience.
An ad on Facebook urges “vote YES” for a California school district’s proposed bond issue. It did not appear with a “paid for by” disclaimer nor was it recorded in Facebook’s new archive of political ads.
Facebook has pledged to assign 3,000-4,000 “content moderators” to monitor political ads, but hasn’t reached that staffing level yet. The company told ProPublica that it is committed to meeting the goal by the U.S. midterm elections this fall.
To ward off “bad actors who try to game our enforcement system,” Facebook has kept secret its specific parameters and keywords for determining if an ad is political. It has published only the list of 20 national issues, which it says is based in part on a data-coding system developed by a network of political scientists called the Comparative Agendas Project. A director on that project, Frank Baumgartner, said the lack of transparency is problematic.
“I think [filtering for political speech] is a puzzle that can be solved by algorithms and big data, but it has to be done right and the code needs to be transparent and publicly available. You can’t have proprietary algorithms determining what we see,” Baumgartner said.
However Facebook’s algorithms work, they are missing overtly political ads. Incumbent members of Congress, national advocacy groups and advocates of local ballot initiatives have all run ads on Facebook without the social network’s promised transparency measures, after they were supposed to be implemented.
Ads from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Rep. Don Norcross, D-N.J., and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., all ran without disclaimers as recently as this past Monday. So did an ad from Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing group that represented a Christian baker whose refusal for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple was upheld by the Supreme Court this month. And ads from NORML, the marijuana legalization advocacy group and MoveOn, the liberal organization, ran for weeks before being taken down.
ProPublica asked Facebook why these ads weren’t considered political. The company said it is reviewing them. “Enforcement is never perfect at launch,” it said.
Read More
What Facebook’s New Political Ad System Misses
Facebook announced a new system to make political ads more transparent. It’s got holes.
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Spare me the calls for civility – President Trump deserves our rage | Jessica Valenti
Samantha Bee and Robert De Niro have taken flak for foul language. But polite responses to Trump play right into his hands
Can we stop pretending that the right cares about civility? Whether it’s the faux outrage over the television host Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “cunt” or the yammering over Robert DeNiro’s “fuck Trump” battle cry at the Tony awards, I’m tired of those on the right feigning shock. After all, they voted in the most brash, offensive and foul-mouthed president in history.
Are we really to believe that the same people who voted for a man who suggested a woman was too ugly to sexually assault now care about a naughty word for female genitalia? The same people who defended a man who said he grabbed women “by the pussy”? Are Americans really supposed to keep quiet and polite as Republicans implement policies that literally rip nursing infants from their mothers’ breasts and are building tented internment camps for children?
Video Exposes Border Patrol Running Over Tohono O’odham in Topawa Today

Video exposes U.S. Border Patrol agent run over young Tohono O’odham man in Topawa community on the Tohono O’odham Nation on Thursday, June 14, 2018. The Border Patrol agent fled the scene and the victim is in the hospital.
Watch video on Facebook:
https://ift.tt/2l8YRam
Friday Open Thread | There’s A Reason Why They Call It – ‘ A Deal With the Devil’
Cause, the Devil ALWAYS WINS.
This has bothered me ever since I read it on Monday.
I still come back to the same question:
ARE.THESE.PEOPLE.SERIOUS.?
DA PHUQ?
ICYMI:
; For Black Lives Activists, Engaging in Trump’s Pardon Politics Feels Like a Deal With the Devil
Is it “worth boosting the reputation of a racist, misogynist, and dangerously authoritarian administration?”
Brandon E. PattersonJun. 11, 2018 3:24 PM
…………………….“It’s clear that this is a PR stunt,” says Malkia Cyril, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Media Justice,
an Oakland-based group focused on the role of surveillance technology in incarcerating people of color. “That said, even a PR stunt can get some of our people free.”
“We have to make a decision,” she adds, “as to whether getting one or two, or three or four, or 10 people released from prison is worth
boosting the reputation of a racist, misogynist, and dangerously
authoritarian administration.”
The ONLY answer to whether or not you will even try to deal with Dolt45 is NO.
NO. NO. NO.
HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THIS DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE?
We LITERALLY have a man who was TOO RACIST DURING THE REAGAN YEARS now as the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of this country.
EVEN IF….you could look past the pure, unadulterated evil that is being done by this DOJ with regards to Immigration and Immigrants – ‘ because that’s not your issue’.
EVEN IF…you could look past the full frontal assault on Voting Rights – ‘ because that’s not your issue’.
Well, how about this? THIS, which is supposed to be’ your issue’.
From POU yesterday:
JojoRaze
PBO pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1927 people from federal prison, and left the federal prison population at its lowest level since the Carter presidency. He did the work but these jokers did no engagement with the administration to get sentencing reform passed.
Jeff Sessions is at DOJ bringing back civil asset forfeiture, aka taking people’s stuff before they are convicted of a crime, giving excess military gear to cities to use against BLM if they protest, which Obama’s DOJ stopped, and wanting to renew the war on drugs and these people think this commutation is in good faith? 45 said the Central Park 5 should still be in jail even though they were innocent. The administration is using slaveholder and Nazi trickery to separate asylum seekers from their children as policy. They don’t care about us. How are these people so blind?
Let’s add to this….
This bullshyt from Dolt45 about hearing from protesting NFL players only happened AFTER KAEPERNICK’S ATTORNEYS SAID THAT THEY WERE GOING TO SUBPOENA HIM!
If you can’t see that this is an attempt to not have to set foot in that deposition, then you are a fool.
I also believe that these folks realize that they played themselves, and are desperate to stay relevant. They had, and squandered, opportunities during 44’s Administration, even while they denied that they got said opportunities. They look at the Parkland kids, taking their moment, seizing it, and building something more with it everyday.
But, just because you have regrets, you don’t go around making deals with the Devil. Charles Blow, just this week, wrote that Trump was Modern Day Bull Connor. I love the comparison, because it’s apt and clarifying. The ridiculousness of these folks talking about ‘common ground’ with Dolt45, would be no different than if MLK said , ‘ we should sit down with Bull Connor and see what we have in common.’
It.is.that.RIDICULOUS.
This is America, right now
This is the % of African Americans not able to vote in just a few states.
VA 21%
FL 21%
KY 26%
AL 15%
MS 16%
America home of the brave land of the incarcerated. https://t.co/DkX2MKU6Y7
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) June 12, 2018
The David Hogg tweet made me think of something. That he connected voting with the disenfranchised because of incarceration – don’t tell me that the kids aren’t getting guidance.
If the BLM Hoteps want to get back in the game and mean something – why not take on ex-felon enfranchisement. These are people who have served their time. Taken their punishment. Why should they be denied their right to vote for a past mistake that they’ve already done the time in prison for? What kind of rehabilitation is tht?
There is nothing on the ballot more important than the referendum on restoring ex-felon voting rights in Florida. Taking away the power from the Governor at a whim, and setting in place solid rules for ex-felons, IS A MUST.
That referendum would change EVERYTHING with regards to Florida. It would slide from purple to lean blue within a night’s election.
I know…but, that’s the pragmatic part of me. The one that actually knows what voting means.
November 2018 — if we can get the Puerto Rican transplants in Florida to vote…they could help change Florida for a generation.
That referendum passes, and the GOP won’t be able to count on Florida in their Electoral College column , beginning in 2020.
But, this would take hard work..hard, on the ground work, where nobody’s going to praise you, or put you on television, or invite you to parties.
But, the end result of this kind of work could change the game in American politics.
THE EASY thing to do…would be to take crumbs from Dolt45 and pretend that what you got wasn’t 10% of what you gave up….
Stop thinking about the EASY WAY…
Do the hard work. Do the foundation work that takes time.
Stop even thinking about Making Deals With the Devil.
Trump under fire for saluting North Korean general

A diplomatic gaffe, or just common courtesy? North Korea releases its own footage of the summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, and it includes one awkward moment that some analysts say is a gift to North Korean propagandists.
French police cut soles off migrant children’s shoes, claims Oxfam
shame is the new by-word for Italy

Charity accuses authorities of detaining minors without food before illegally returning them to Italy
French border police have been accused of detaining migrant children as young as 12 in cells without food or water, cutting the soles off their shoes and stealing sim cards from their mobile phones, before illegally sending them back to Italy.
A report released on Friday by the charity Oxfam also cites the case of a “very young” Eritrean girl, who was forced to walk back to the Italian border town of Ventimiglia along a road with no pavement while carrying her 40-day-old baby.

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