Her recent special — “Christmas on I.C.E.” — was a perfect example of her signature blend of comedy and social activism.
Our Cellphones Aren’t Safe
Security flaws threaten our privacy and bank accounts. So why aren’t we fixing them?
Buffalo are the backbone of Lakota food sovereignty
And the wolf to restore balance to the ecology. OGLALA SIOUX NATION, U.S.A. – Blood staining their hands, dozens of men, women and children are wielding knives in the schoolyard. Bones and flesh and entrails are heaped in mounds all around. This scene in the heartlands of the United States is, however, anything but the kind of violent outbreak besieging schools across the country. […]
Jennie-O Recalls More Than 164,000 Pounds of Ground Turkey
Native American Homeless Crisis in Minnesota Inspires an Unlikely Alliance
In a rare show of unity, tribal nations worked together to address a grim homeless encampment near downtown Minneapolis.
What We Learned From Collecting 100,000 Targeted Facebook Ads
I know there is a lot of hoopla about this but wonder how it is different from similar targeting by mail (rented and target lists) and targeted autobot phone calls that people of all stripes have been using since the 1920’s. Individuals have always had the option of disbelieving, disregarding, and discrediting lies or accepting them and passing them along because they fit their biases.

Since we launched our Facebook Political Ad Collector project in fall 2017, more than 16,000 people have participated in it. They all agreed to install a browser plug-in that anonymously sent us the ads they see when they browse Facebook. We used that data to understand and report on how political messaging on Facebook works, and how the system is being gamed to manipulate the public discourse.
Although the number of users is large, over the summer we noticed a potential snag: We were receiving more ads from Democrats and progressive groups than from Republicans or conservative groups. Our hunch was that this was because we had more liberal participants than conservatives ones.
We tried a number of things to make our ad collection more diverse: to start, we bought our own Facebook ads asking people across a range of states to install the ad collector. We also teamed up with Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, for a special election-oriented project, in an attempt to reach a broader swath of users.
But because we made the Political Ad Collector almost completely anonymous, we couldn’t say much definitively about the audience. We also couldn’t know for sure how much of the skew in our findings was because of the people who participated in the project and how much of it was because left-leaning groups used Facebook advertising more than (or differently than) conservative groups.
To dig deeper, we partnered with some academic researchers and a research firm called YouGov to create a panel of users from across a wide spectrum of demographic groups and political ideologies who would agree to use a special version of the ad collector plug-in that was less anonymous. For these users, we had a unique ID that was tied back to data about them provided to us by YouGov — demographics, political leaning, race, state of residence, but not name or address.
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This collaboration was suggested, and funded, by the Democracy Fund.
YouGov paid members of this new group to install a special version of the Political Ad Collector browser plug-in. We were able to link their answers to demographic questions — like age and partisanship — to the ads that they sent us. Through this survey, 3,588 participants submitted at least five ads from Oct. 15 until the election. The group was designed to yield a large and diverse enough sample that will let us, and academic researchers who study political ads, make statistically valid claims about the ads people see.
We didn’t change anything about the way we collect data from users of the original, publicly available ad collector plug-in who were not participating in the YouGov survey. They remain anonymous to us, and we collected absolutely no personal information from them.
Ads that were seen by participants in the YouGov survey, with the demographic data stripped, are part of our existing database of ads. We aren’t publishing the survey-derived data, though we have shared it with some academic researchers.
Now that we’ve got a better sample that can help us draw broad conclusions about Facebook political ads, here’s some of what we’ve learned from the project:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than 70 percent of all the political ads we saw were highly targeted by ideology. Most ads were shown to at least twice as many people from one side of the political spectrum than the other. Only about 18 percent of political ads were seen by anything close to an even ratio of liberals and conservatives.
One advertiser that targeted both sides was AARP, which spent about $700,000 on ads from May to the election. Many of those ads simply urged viewers to vote; some ads encouraged people to hold their member of Congress accountable for voting yes on “last year’s bad health care bills.” The AARP has opposed efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
“AARP has a long history of nonpartisan voter engagement,” an AARP spokesperson said in a statement. “Our goal was to engage our members, whose views span the ideological spectrum. These facts guided our strategy.”
The ad that was seen by the most people in the YouGov sample was this one from Tom Steyer’s “Need to Impeach” organization, which included a video saying, “We need to impeach Donald Trump before he does more damage,” citing “legally segregated camps” for migrant children and Hurricane Maria deaths. The ad was seen almost exclusively by self-identified liberals in our sample. According to Facebook, Steyer has spent $2.3 million on Facebook ads between May and Election Day. (Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor, are donors to ProPublica, and Taylor is on our board.)
But because the Facebook advertising system makes it easy to show ads to very small target audiences, a relatively small number of participants in our project saw the “Need to Impeach” ad. Of the 3,588 people who submitted at least five ads from Oct. 15 until Election Day, only 146 saw it.
That microtargeting may help explain why, even with a pretty large number of participants, and including all these additional participants who better represent the country, we still didn’t see any ads or advertisers caught up in investigations and news stories about foreign election meddling. We did, however, report on a mysterious Facebook page called “America Progress Now” urging liberals to vote for Green Party candidates. The candidates themselves had never heard of the group, and we couldn’t find any address or legal registration for it.
We also saw ads from liberal groups that used misleading tactics we first saw being employed in 2016 by groups like the Internet Research Agency in Russia. “Voter Awareness Project” urged conservatives not to vote to re-elect Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican senator, citing Trump’s previous antagonism toward him. But the group was actually run by a prominent liberal. And other liberals, like Ohio gubernatorial candidate Rich Cordray and the Environmental Defense Action Fund, ran political ads from pages with names that implied they were news organizations, like “Ohio Newswire” and “Breaking News Texas.”
We also found a fair number of political ads that Facebook didn’t label as political as part of their new system, including clearly political ones from Sen. Kamala Harris, Uber, Alliance Defending Freedom and others.
Open Questions
We still have some unanswered questions about how advertising works on Facebook, including some that go beyond political ads:
While we found a way to determine, in part, how an ad is targeted, there are complexities to Facebook’s systems that we can’t detect or understand. For instance, what is the impact of the algorithm Facebook uses to show ads to whoever is mostly likely to click? Upturn, a think tank that researches equity issues in the design and governance of technology, says in a court filing that they ran a job ad for a bus driver and, on its own, Facebook showed this ad to four times as many men as women.
Advertisers pay Facebook more for their ads to be seen by some kinds of people than by others — based on, for example, age, demographics and median income. What’s the effect of some people seeing on average more expensive ads than others? How big is the disparity? Whose attention is cheap, and whose is expensive? How do cheap ads differ from more expensive ones?
Facebook has a “lookalike audience” ad-targeting feature, which lets advertisers target people who are “similar to” their page’s visitors or personal contact info they upload. Could this be a sneaky (or even unintentional) way to target a housing or job ad in a discriminatory way?
Facebook classifies individual users by their political beliefs and their “multicultural affinity,” letting advertisers show ads just to, for instance, people who are “very conservative” or who have “Multicultural affinity: African American (US).” How accurate are Facebook’s guesses? You can see political ads targeted by multicultural affinity here: African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic – All, Hispanic – English Dominant, Hispanic – Spanish Dominant, Hispanic – Bilingual.
One final note: Now that the midterm elections have finished, with only a few U.S. elections happening in 2019, we’re busy figuring out the Ad Collector’s next chapter. We’ll make an announcement shortly.
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Donald Trump May Have Dodged Draft With Help of Podiatrist Who Got Rent Breaks From His Dad
President Donald Trump has remained cagey on the subject of his apparent draft dodging during the Vietnam War, saying only that he had received a medical exemption for “temporary” bone spurs. But according to a New York Times investigation, a Queens podiatrist may have helped Trump secure a permanent deferment in exchange for extra benevolent treatment from his landlord: Donald’s father, Fred. [ more › ]
The Farm Bill did not destroy SNAP, but USDA did an end run on work requirement waivers
Forget letting them eat cake, let families in need go hungry! That will include children of active duty US military!
As I noted earlier, Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill without gutting SNAP but President Trump exacted a price for signing it—making it harder for States to exempt participants from work requirements.
The USDA released its new work-requirement rules just as Congress was passing the bill (here is the USDA’s quick Infographic summary).
As Politico put it, “USDA unveils crackdown on SNAP waivers.”
In his Orwellian press release, USDA Secretary Purdue said the new rules are:
intended to move more able-bodied recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to self-sufficiency through the dignity of work. The rule is meant to restore the system to what it was meant to be: assistance through difficult times, not lifelong dependency…Long-term reliance on government assistance has never been part of the American dream.
In an even more Orwellian op-ed, Purdue said:
This restores the dignity of work to a sizeable segment of our population, while it is also respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program.
Americans are generous people who believe it is their responsibility to help their fellow citizens when they encounter a difficult stretch. That is the commitment behind SNAP. But like other Federal welfare programs, it was never intended to be a way of life. A central theme of the Trump administration has been to expand prosperity for all Americans, which includes helping people lift themselves out of pervasive poverty.
Trump’s statement outdoes anything Orwell could have imagined:
Today’s action will help Americans transition from welfare to gainful employment, strengthening families and uplifting communities…That was a difficult thing to get done, but the farmers wanted it done. We all wanted it done. I think, in the end, it’s going to make a lot of people very happy.
Why Orwellian?
Farmers? Strengthening families? Uplifting communities? Making people happy? Trump has to be kidding.
The true purpose of the new requirements is to reduce SNAP enrollment, never mind that most people who participate in SNAP really need it. The USDA says the new policy will 755,000 people out of the current 39 million.
Under current SNAP rules, adults who can work (able-bodied adults without dependents— ABAWDs) must work or be in training at least 80 hours per month. Otherwise they are only allowed to get SNAP benefits for up to three months in a three-year period.
But states can apply for waivers of this time limit, and 36 states have done so.
One reality check: Because the USDA does not keep data on food stamp recipients who participate in state employment and training programs, or on whether such programs do anything useful to help SNAP recipients achieve self-sufficiency, there is no way to know whether the new requirements will do any good.
I’m not the only one saying so. The Government Accountability Office has just issued a report making precisely this point.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains:
Taking essential benefits like food benefits away from those who are unemployed wouldn’t address the inequities in the labor market or the challenges that so many workers face. Instead of punishing struggling workers, policymakers should support them through ideas with bipartisan support, such as a higher minimum wage, a stronger Earned Income Tax Credit, and paid family leave.
Maybe someday.
Customs and Border Protection orders medical checks on children in custody

CBP said it needs help of other agencies to provide healthcare after a second immigrant child died in its custody this month
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have ordered medical checks on every child in its custody after an eight-year-old boy from Guatemala died, marking the second death of an immigrant child in the agency’s care this month.
Related: Second Guatemalan child dies after being detained by US border agents
Carmen’s Christmas Age Four
Once upon a time there lived in the little village of Saranac, New York a dear little girl named Carmen whose papa and mama were very poor but happy as Christmas time drew near.
Carmen talked of Santa Claus and wondered if he would visit her. She had a dear good Auntie who was always thoughtful for her comfort and did many things for her that her mamma was unable to do because she was an invalid.
So when Auntie made her presents, she gave nice big gingham aprons or dresses, or stockings which made mama’s heart glad, for she knew they were the very things her girlie needed.
A short time before Christmas papa hired a pony and carriage and took Carmen and went to the stores to do their Saturday shopping. In one store, where they went, were beautiful dollies of all kinds and many pretty toys. Carmen selected a little cradle, a little white high chair for dollie and a cute little dollie in pink dress and bonnet. Mama got her candy also and some necessary articles of clothing.
Now these things were meant for her Christmas gifts but she had them so long before time that she forgot they were Christmas gifts.
One day a letter came from dear Auntie saying a box was on the way full of Christmas cheer – and when it was opened, the dear baby was delighted with the nice new aprons, bibs, slippers, etc. But she knew they were from Auntie – not Santa and her toys she knew were from papa and mama. And when anyone asked her what Santa brought her, she would say, “He didn’t bring me neny sing.” This made mama feel badly for she couldn’t do any more for her baby but would tell her that she had been well rewarded by others – but still she could not forget that Santa had forgotten her.
As mama was setting the table for tea on Christmas night, she took down a small glass dish for pickles – one she had not used for a long time and Carmen had forgotten she had. So she asked where it came from. Mama told her she found it one time in her stocking on Christmas morning. “Well, couldn’t I hang up my stocking?” asked Carmen. “It is too late my dear,” said Mama. Santa filled stockings last night. “Well… but maybe he would remember that he forgot me and will come tonight,” said Carmen. Mama told her to run along and not bother her – for she was nervous and sometimes a little cross, and Carmen annoyed her with so many questions.
When bedtime came, she got ready for bed and mama told her she might get into her own bed down stairs till papa went up – then she wouldn’t be up there all alone. No one noticed her undressing but a long time after she was asleep papa said, “I guess I’ll shave.”
He got things ready and as the fire was low, he went out to get wood – so thought he would prepare the kindling for the morning fire at the same time. While he was out, Mama happened to notice that on one the two posts of a chair were hung two little stockings – all baggy at the knee where some little girl had romped and played, and a tiny hole, which the garter made at the top.
The big tears started in mama’s eyes and a big stinging in her nose made more big tears. When papa came in she said, “Look! What faith the child has.” Papa’s eyes were a little misty too. He said, “Haven’t you any thing you could put in there?” But she had nothing that Carmen had not seen.
Money was scarce – for the farmers papa chopped wood for did not always have ready money to pay him. But by hunting around, they scared up forty cents and papa said, “I’ll not shave but will hurry down and the drug store will likely be open and I may be able to get something.” It was nine o’clock then – and it being Christmas – the drug store was closed but he found another store open and so did the best he could there.
He got mixed candy and peanuts, oranges and 2 picture books. Mama had some net candy bags, which she filled with candy and put in then the nuts and lastly the books rolled up and sticking out of the top.
When papa got ready for bed he picked Carmen up and carried her up the stairs and when she got up there she awoke and began to ask if he left the door unlocked for Santa, and if he left a light on for him, etc. She could hardly get to sleep again. She was so excited and mama and papa were glad they had discovered the little stockings.
When morning came papa, came down first to build the fire and Carmen called down, “Daddy! Is there neny sing in my stockings?” Daddy said, “Come and see” and there was a very happy little girl that morning.
She was more pleased with those few things than all the other things she got – for “Santa” had brought them. So mama resolved that next year – what ever came for her, something should be reserved and put in the stocking and it would be of greater value.
These are the facts as they happened on the Christmas of 1912.
Maude Wright
* * *
Maude Wright, my grandmother, was not able to directly keep her promise. She died a few months later from the effects of chronic TB and the birth of her second child.
My mother, Carmen, is the one who actually kept her mother’s vow. Maude Wright mailed the letter to her sister and Carmen’s auntie passed this letter to her. I did not see the letter until one year after after my mother had died on December 7, 1994. It was then, a week before Christmas of 1995, that I understood why my brother and I received a stocking from Santa each Christmas that contained an orange, some nuts, a little left over Halloween candy and a comic book or two. Thanks, Grandma and Merry Christmas to all. Ned Hamson
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