GlacialTurtle

Excerpt:

Elon Musk’s DOGE team is targeting the Department of Labor, as Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX are under multiple labor investigations by federal agencies.

The scheduled meeting at DOL this afternoon, an initial step in gaining access to the department’s IT systems, has drawn protests from employees arguing that DOGE's incursions at the behest of Musk are unaccountable and threaten workers’ rights. Officials at more than a half-dozen agencies have raised concerns internally that Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)'s actions are illegal, flouting checks on executive branch power.

• In November, SpaceX argued in federal court that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is unconstitutional, a case joined by Amazon. The NLRB, created in 1935, is an independent agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act and decides labor complaints.

• Musk’s companies are facing enforcement actions from a slew of federal agencies, as followed by the nonprofit Public Citizen in its Corporate Enforcement Tracker, many of them over labor protections.

• At the NLRB, Tesla faces seven cases alleging unfair labor practices that would cover more than 140,474 employees. Tesla is also under investigation by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), part of the DOL, regarding a workplace death in an Austin, Texas factory.

• At the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Tesla is amid a civil investigation regarding workplace retaliation and racial discrimination at a California factory, where Black employees allege they were subjected to racial slurs and other harassment.

• SpaceX has 10 open cases with the NLRB covering 9,500 employees, and is litigating a complaint that it illegally fired workers who signed letters criticizing Musk.

Rick Claypool, a research director for Public Citizen, says DOGE’s sights on the Labor Department looks like “a billionaire CEO's attempt to seize the means of worker protection.”

“Is Elon Musk so afraid of the cases SpaceX and Tesla face from OSHA, EEOC, and the NLRB that he is willing to corruptly interfere with law enforcement?,” said Claypool. “If so, the reality that the Trump administration is serving the super rich while screwing workers could not be made clearer.”

Some people evidently need reminding concerning the recent attempts, yet again, at certain dipshits deflecting to voter blaming rather than holding people in power accountable for their own decisions and actions.

Excerpt:

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

[...]

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

If your response to Trumps recent claims around Gaza are to gloat about how Trump is bad and therefore it's voters fault, you do not and never did care about Palestinians.

If you cared, you would have supported the uncommitted movement in telling Biden and Harris to change policy on Gaza, whose actions were already committing genocide against Palestinians.

If you cared, you would be holding people in power to account over their unbridled support for genocide, and the people who decided committing genocide was more important than listening to their own conscience and their own voter base on the issue.

If you cared, you would not exclusively use the lives of people who were already murdered by the previous administration as some moral cudgel against the people who actually advocated for their lives, their families, and their rights because you're mad that Democrats failed to turn out votes in their favour.

8 months ago, I was told Gaza was irrelevant, no one cares about foreign policy, the issue would go away, everyone who mentions it is some russian disinfo china bot spreading anti-Democrat propaganda. I was told the uncommitted movement asking for something as simple as having a Palestinian American speaker at the DNC, who as a condition of speaking would essentially endorse Kamala on stage, in return for even the slightest hint of movement on Gaza and the unconditional support for Israel to that point, was actually a sabotage campaign being secretly waged to undermine Democrats.

You do not, after the election, have the moral nor intellectual standing to now performatively voter shame about how it's everyone else fault except the people in power who actually decide how to campaign and what policies to pursue and advocate for.

A Palestian-American advocating a cease-fire and a stop to the literal genocide was a step too far for Democrats and their campaign strategy. What wasn't a step too far? Committing the actual genocide, and inviting speakers who proudly boast about their fathers being in the Contras.

For paywall: https://archive.is/WJqah

Hey, remember when in 2020 any issue he had speaking was JuSt A StUtTeR? How you should ignore decades of public speaking and interviews and how they looked nothing like the severity and number of problems he was having on stage during primaries and speeches? Remember the terrible debate with Trump this year that anyone could have felt was liable to happen if they weren't sticking their head in the sand the entire time?

Excerpts:

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.

Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public. “They body him to such a high degree,” a person who witnessed it said, adding that the “hand holding” is unlike anything other recent presidents have had.

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden’s refusal to yield earlier.

This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.

[...]

The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble. Biden, now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers. The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.

[...]

Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.

They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides.

Ideally, the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said. His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said. The president, known for long and rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time.

The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age.

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

[...]

During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.

By the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president. Bates said that Biden stayed abreast of polling data.

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

To get around pay wall: https://archive.is/RHuUy

Excerpts:

While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. "It's military whitewashing," explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. "The division commander designated this area as a 'kill zone.' Anyone who enters is shot."

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200."

These accounts of indiscriminate killing and the routine classification of civilian casualties as terrorists emerged repeatedly in Haaretz's conversations with recent Gaza veterans.

[...]

Haaretz has gathered testimonies from active-duty soldiers, career officers, and reservists that reveal the unprecedented authority given to commanders. As the IDF operates across multiple fronts, division commanders have received expanded powers. Previously, bombing buildings or launching airstrikes required approval from the IDF chief of staff. Now, such decisions can be made by lower-ranking officers.

"Division commanders now have almost unlimited firepower authority in combat zones," explains a veteran officer in Division 252. "A battalion commander can order drone strikes, and a division commander can launch conquest operations." Some sources describe IDF units operating like independent militias, unrestricted by standard military protocols.

'We took him to the cage'

The chaotic reality has repeatedly forced commanders and fighters to face severe moral dilemmas. "The order was clear: 'Anyone crossing the bridge into the [Netzarim] corridor gets a bullet in the head,'" recalls a veteran fighter from Division 252.

"One time, guards spotted someone approaching from the south. We responded as if it was a large militant raid. We took positions and just opened fire. I'm talking about dozens of bullets, maybe more. For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing."

But the incident didn't end there. "We approached the blood-covered body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was just a boy, maybe 16." An intelligence officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned the boy wasn't a Hamas operative – but just a civilian.

"That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we'd kill ten more tomorrow," the fighter adds. "When someone pointed out he was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. The commander said: 'Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone's a terrorist.' This deeply troubled me – did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?"

Similar incidents continue to surface. An officer in Division 252's command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants. "Standard procedure requires photographing bodies and collecting details when possible, then sending evidence to intelligence to verify militant status or at least confirm they were killed by the IDF," he explains. "Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants."

A look at Bluesky's claims to being decentralised, written by Christine Lemmer-Webber, who helped create ActivityPub (the protocol that lies underneath Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube and others).

The best way to understand the reason for this difference in hosting requirements is to understand the underlying architecture of these systems. ActivityPub follows an message passing architecture (utilizing publish-subscribe architecture prominently for most "subscription" oriented uses), the same as email, XMPP, and so on. A message is addressed, and then delivered to recipients. (Actually a more fully peer-to-peer system would deliver more directly; all of email, XMPP, ActivityPub and so on use a client-server architecture, so there is a particular server which tends to operate on behalf of a particular user. See comments on the fediverse later in this article for how things can be moved more peer-to-peer.) This turns out to be pretty efficient; if only users on five servers need to know about a message, out of tens of thousands of servers, only those five servers will be contacted. Until recently, every system I knew of described as federated used a message passing architecture, to the degree where I and others assumed that federation implied a message passing architecture, because achieving the architectural goal of many independent nodes cooperating to produce a unified whole seemed to imply this was necessary for efficiency of a substantially sized network. If Alyssa wants to write a piece of mail to Ben, she can send it directly to Ben, and it can arrive at Ben's house. If Ben wants to reply, Ben can reply directly to Alyssa. Your intuitions about email apply exactly here, because that's effectively what this design is.

Bluesky does not utilize message passing, and instead operates in what I call a shared heap architecture. In a shared heap architecture, instead of delivering mail to someone's house (or, in a client-to-server architecture as most non p2p mailing lists are, at least their apartment's mail room), letters which may be interesting all are dumped at a post office (called a "relay") directly. From there it's the responsibility of interested parties to show up and filter through the mail to see what's interesting to them. This means there is no directed delivery; if you want to see replies which are relevant to your messages, you (or someone operating on behalf of you) had better sort through and know about every possible message to find out what messages could be a reply.

[...]

The answer is: Bluesky solves this problem via centralization. Since there is really just one very large relay which everyone is expected to participate in, this relay has a god's-eye knowledge base. Entities which sort through mail and relevant replies for users are AppViews, which pull from the relay and also have a god's-eye knowledge base, and also do filtering. So too do any other number of services which participate in the network: they must operate at the level of gods rather than mortals.

[...]

I'm not sure this behavior is consistent after all with how blocking works on X-Twitter; it was not my understanding that blocking someone would be public information. But blocks are indeed public information on Bluesky, and anyone can query who is blocking or being blocked by anyone. It is true that looking at a blocking account from a blocked account on most social media systems or observing the results of interactions can reveal information about who is blocked, but this is not the same as this being openly queryable information. There is a big difference between "you can look at someone's post and see who is being blocked" to "you can query the network for every person who is blocking or is blocked by JK Rowling".

[...]

The reason for this is very simple: we have seen people who utilize blocklists be retaliated against for blocking someone who is angry about being blocked. It was our opinion that sharing such information could result in harassment. (Last I checked, Mastodon provides the user with the choice of whether or not to send a "report" about a block to the offending instance so that moderators of that server can notice a problematic user and take action, but delivering such information is not required.)

That said, to Bluesky's credit, this is an issue that is being openly considered. There is an open issue to consider whether or not private blocks are possible. Which does lead to a point, despite my many critiques here: it is true that even many of the things I have talked about could be changed and evaluated in the future. But nonetheless, in many ways I consider the decision to have blocks be publicly queryable to be an example of emergent behavior from initial decisions... early architectural decisions can have long-standing architectural results, and while many things can be changed, some things are particularly difficult to change form an initial starting point.

[...]

I've analyzed previously in the document the challenges Bluesky has in achieving meaningful decentralization or federation. Bluesky now has much bigger pressures than decentralization, namely to satisfy the massive scale of users who wish to flock to the platform now, to satisfy investors which will increasingly be interested in whether or not they can see a return, and to achieve enough income to keep their staff and servers going. Rearchitecting towards meaningful decentralization will be a big pivot and will likely introduce many of the problems that Bluesky has touted their platform as not having that other decentralized platforms have.

There are early signs that Bluesky the company is already considering or exploring features that only make sense in a centralized context. Direct messages were discussed previously in this document, but with the announcement of premium accounts, it will be interesting to see what happens. Premium accounts would be possible to handle in a fully decentralized system: higher quality video uploads makes sense. What becomes more uncertain is what happens when a self-hosted PDS user uploads their own higher quality videos, will those be mirrored onto Bluesky's CDN in higher quality as well? Likewise, ads seem likely to be coming to Bluesky

A common way to make premium accounts more valuable is to make them ad-free. But if Bluesky is sufficiently decentralized and its filtering and labeling tools work as described, it will be trivial for users to set up filters which remove ads from the stream. Traditionally when investors realize users are doing this and removing a revenue stream, that is the point at which they start pressuring hard on enshittification and removing things like public access to APIs, etc. What will happen in Bluesky's case?

Here is where "credible exit" really is the right term for Bluesky's architectural goals. Rearchitecting towards meaningful decentralization and federation is a massive overhaul of Bluesky's infrastructure, but providing "credible exit" is not. It is my opinion that leaning into "credible exit" is the best thing that Bluesky can do: perhaps a large corporation or two always have to sit at the center of Bluesky, but perhaps also it will be possible for people to leave.

The inherent assumption in “big computer” socialism is that the problems in the Soviet system of planning were not insurmountable, and other alternative planning systems, like the brief Cybersyn experiment in Chile show a way forward. Indeed, there was a glimmer of this possibility in the USSR. Faced with a stagnating economy in the 60s, it was clear to many that the Soviet planning system needed reforms. The road taken was that of the Kosygin-Lieberman 1965 reforms which introduced some market mechanisms, such as using profitability and sales as the two key indicators of enterprise success. These substituted the old Stalinist principle of “business bookkeeping”, where enterprises had to meet planners’ expectations within a system of fixed prices for inputs/outputs, causing perverse incentives such as making badly-made surpluses or increases in product weight as a net positive for the enterprise.

However, there was another option to the introduction of some market mechanisms in the economy: the road of using the available computing technology to help the planners plan and eliminate the perverse incentives. This was the main idea of Victor Glushkov, and his OGAS system. OGAS was not just “the Soviet internet” as it has sometimes been referred to; in its original form, it was supposed to be a system for radically modifying the planning systems of the economy. The original idea of OGAS was never implemented. Instead, it was downgraded and gutted to the point it became a ghost of itself, failing to provide a line of flight for the creation of a new economy. However, the principles behind it still hold, and can guide us in thinking about what shape the future can take. It is in this context that we present a short biography of Victor Gluskhov and the Soviet attempt at having a “big computer” plan its economy.

A very good look at the severe problems with how certain campaigns are run, the way certain people just fail upwards in the Democratic party, and the huge gap that can exist between media impact/prevalence and actual on the ground reality.

Also a weirdo 21 year old organising a campaign complaining about communism and usual signs of liberals sticking their head in the sand because anything that might critique them is automatically "helping [Republican opponent]".

While Cruz underperformed Trump in counties across the state, Allred also underperformed in almost all of the state’s most populous counties—most of which already swing Democratic—and barely won more than Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 total. The loss was so bad that Texas’s longtime Democratic Party chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, stepped down—but not before he partly blamed Democrats’ loss on the party’s support for trans rights.

Texas Democrats perennially claim to be on the brink of turning the state blue, but this latest beatdown ought to be the first that yields a true reckoning with why the party continually disappoints in elections in a state which, the party sages tell us, demographically ought to be shifting to their advantage. But given the recent tenor from the party’s centrist wing, from Hinojosa down to his Gen Z heirs apparent, the lesson of Allred’s loss—that no amount of money or online clout can paper over a candidate’s weaknesses—could just as easily fall on deaf ears.

[...]

In his concession speech last week, Allred stumbled through a Winston Churchill quote: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others.” It took courage, he said, for him and his supporters to “participate in an American election,” despite the odds against them. Yet Allred’s strategy reeked of cowardice. Mirroring the Harris campaign, Allred ran to the right on the border and threw trans people under the bus. Counter to Harris, Allred tried differentiating himself from Biden, even voting to condemn his “open-borders policies.” It wasn’t enough.

The Democratic Party prefers candidates—particularly in red states—who can raise a lot of money quickly. Allred visited just 34 of Texas’s 254 counties, signaling an aversion to public confrontation, but spent a mind-boggling $57.75 million on advertising and marketing to make up for it. How? He relied heavily on donation centers in other states, particularly the suburbs of Washington, D.C., receiving far fewer small-dollar donations in-state and leaning on political action committees to make up the difference. When journalists and friendly critics pointed out the obvious risks to this strategy, Monique Alcala, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said on X that they were “spreading misinformation” and should “please—sit down.”* As Brandon Rottinghaus told Texas Monthly, “Beto worked from the bottom up, and Allred worked from the top down.”

As early as the primary, fellow Texas Democrats were ringing alarm bells about a wayward campaign. But online, Allred’s team seemed more interested in squashing intraparty dissent than winning in November. After Jen Ramos, a member of the Texas Democratic Party’s executive committee, told The Texas Tribune in August that Allred was taking the party’s liberal base for granted, “a group of influencers and organizers went out of their way to discredit me,” Ramos told me, adding that she was accused of “aiding and abetting Ted Cruz.”

Olivia Julianna, a 21-year-old influencer who spoke at this year’s Democratic National Convention and was advising the Allred campaign on “youth voter turnout,” took a similar line to Alcala, writing on X in the wake of the Tribune article: “Anyone saying Colin Allred hasn’t intentionally engaged the base or traveled the state is spreading misinformation and frankly helping Ted Cruz’s campaign divide the Democratic Party.” Since last week’s election, Julianna has been ranting online against “communism,” as if a tiny ideological milieu in the U.S.—let alone Texas—played a major role in their loss.

[...]

Meanwhile, Allred’s outreach to farmers, who make up 14 percent of the state’s workforce—and more than 12 percent of the U.S. total, by far the most of any state—was sporadic at best. Clayton Tucker, a rancher and chair of the Lampasas Democratic Party (based in a 712-square-mile county with a population of fewer than 24,000), said between the crowded Democratic primary and Election Day, there was “quite a dry spell” in communication. Tucker lobbied hard for Allred to appear before farmers and lay out his vision. Finally, in October, weeks away from the election, Allred joined Tucker in Lubbock, a college town just below the Panhandle, for a small roundtable to address their concerns. “That’s important work,” Tucker ceded, “but it needed to be more at scale.”

[...]

The more cynical among us might view this as a racket. Consider the case of Isaiah Martin, a centrist Gen Z Houstonian and friend of Julianna’s who briefly ran for Congress. In September 2023, he posted a single ad that went viral, landing him on MSNBC to talk about his vision for the country. He acquired Annika Albrecht, who previously worked for Blue Dog Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, as his campaign manager, raised about $400,000 (mostly from donors outside his district), and, a couple months later, unceremoniously dropped out. Despite his electoral face-plant, he became an influencer touring the country for the Harris campaign. The Texas Democratic Party is replete with “organizers” such as these, who seem always to fail upward. Other longtime Democrats have pointed to MJ Hegar as a similar problem: She raised all that money, and where is she now? (Far from the limelight, working for Deloitte.)

“There’s not much money to be made when you invest in grassroots,” Tucker told The New Republic. “I think we’re too culturally obsessed with commercials and mailers. Speaking for myself, no mailer or commercial has ever convinced me of anything, but a conversation, whether that’s over the phone or in person, has.”

Some have given up on the “demographics as destiny” argument, in which liberals assumed the changing racial makeup of the state would inevitably mean Democrats would sweep into power. Tucker, for instance, said an emphasis on economic populism is popular in the rural counties that lie devastated, to this day, by Nafta. But even as the demographic myth lies dying, the next one has been born: that young people, armed with technology and social media, will connect with voters to drive a blue wave.

It's literally 2016 but worse somehow.

One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.

A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.

Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.

To get around paywall: https://archive.is/JY11t or use Firefox's reader mode.

In-depth piece on the use of private detention centres that Biden and Kamala claimed they were going to close. Documents abuse of detainees, detainees being held in solitary confinement as punishment when asking for the paperwork they need to complete their applications, and the massive commercial growth thanks to private prisons converting to become detention centres instead:

But as record numbers of asylum-seekers continued to arrive at the southern border in the past three years, the administration has relied increasingly on privately operated immigration detention centers. The centers that DHS recommended be closed have remained open, continuing to hold thousands of detainees. And even though overall immigrant detention has fallen under Biden from the all-time highs during the Trump administration, the US now concentrates more of its immigrant detainees than ever in privately operated ICE facilities—the same ones Biden vowed to drive out of the sector.

Part of that shift is tied to an executive order he signed less than a week after taking office, one barring the Department of Justice from renewing any contracts with privately contracted prisons and jails. The ban, importantly, didn’t apply to immigrant detainees. Some of those private contractors quickly converted criminal jails into immigrant detention centers, signing new contracts with ICE. In 2021 about 79% of all ICE detainees were held in privately run detention centers; by mid-2023 the percentage had jumped to more than 90%, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In the South, which absorbed much of the shifts in detention flows, the portion was even greater. In Louisiana, for example, about 97% of detainees are now overseen by private companies. Such shifts have helped some of America’s largest private prison contractors rake in more revenue during the Biden administration than ever.

[...]

Decker’s organization is part of a coalition that has conducted more than 6,000 interviews with detainees inside the nine Louisiana detention centers since 2022. They’ve compiled stories of beatings, sexual assaults and attacks with pepper spray and tear gas. Detainees reported being shackled in five-point restraints for as long as 26 hours, unable to eat or use the restroom, and left with cuts on their wrists and legs. They described conditions inside the centers that included rat infestations, black mold, leaking ceilings and worm-infested food. “The pattern repeated especially in the privately run facilities is that the companies are actually profiting by offering substandard quality of food, clothing and medical care,” Decker says. “Less than the bare minimum.”

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But in 2021 the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights division conducted an investigation into allegations of abuse at Winn. The subsequent DHS report, published that November, raised “serious concerns” about substandard conditions, inappropriate use of force by staff and numerous “serious medical and mental health concerns.” A DHS memo written a month later recommended that Winn “be closed or drawn down” and that ICE immediately “discontinue placing detainees at Winn until the identified culture and conditions that can lead to abuse, mistreatment, and discrimination toward detainees are corrected.”

But Winn never closed. When ICE’s five-year contract for the facility expired this May, the Biden administration renewed it. The precise terms of the deal haven’t yet been made public, but Winn continues to hold hundreds of detainees.

ICE and the White House didn’t respond to questions for this story. But the agency has previously defended conditions in all of its facilities by declaring that it “is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody.” It has emphasized that it uses “multi-layered inspections, standards, and an oversight program” to continuously review the detention centers to ensure humane treatment as well as comprehensive medical and mental health care.