His win in the primary boosts his chance of loss in November

Since October I’ve been working behind the scenes to get a proposal on the Michigan ballot. The effort up to this point was to gather signatures. I mentioned being a part of this during the second and third No Kings rallies. The proposal is to get corporate money out of Michigan politics by banning utilities from donating to the politicians who regulate them and banning political donations to government entities they have contracts with. I mention all that because today was the day to turn in all those signatures to the Secretary of State office. We need about 356,000 signatures and the leaders say we turned in 500,000! Of course, there was a big press conference outside of the Secretary of State office building. Part of it was for the leader to say why we did it. Part of it is to show off the boxes of signatures. Here’s a screenshot from the presser.

Once it is on the ballot, of course the utilities will spend big to defeat it. I hear 80% of voters are for it. I recently wrote about the nasty guy’s phone and how he asked for deposits, but was taking a long time to actually produce it. A recent change to the agreement said the phone may never show up. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the phone is now being delivered. Perhaps the bad press forced someone’s hand. Then again, a CNET tech reviewer has a phone. No word on whether regular people have one. The opinion of the reviewer is that this is not a recent model of phone. The only thing it has going for it is that the nasty guy’s Truth Social is already loaded. You may debate whether that’s a reason to get one. Also, the logo of the US flag is missing two stripes. And instead of being made in the US it was designed “with American values in mind.” There were claims there were preorders from 590,000 people. The real number may be only 10,000.

What all of this makes clear is that there’s no world where Trump Mobile is a real, viable company that stands on its own. Only 10,000 customers and one lone, crappy, outdated phone? Anyone who doesn’t have a daddy in the White House would have gone out of business months ago.

Emily Singer of Kos reported that Ken Paxton won the Republican primary for US Senate in Texas. He’s the one the nasty guy endorsed. His win means Sen. John Cornyn’s career ends with the year. Democrats are delighted because Paxton has a “laundry list of scandals” including an impeachment (but not removal) from his job of state Attorney General and alleged adultery leading to divorce. His win in the primary makes Democratic nominee James Talarico much more likely to win in the fall. Talarico claims Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America. Sorry, I reserve that spot for the nasty guy. I can agree that Paxton is the most corrupt in Texas. In this case we thank the nasty guy for his efforts. His win in the primary boosts his chance of his loss in November. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Jamie Dupree and an article from NBC News saying the South Carolina attempt to gerrymander to eliminate the last Democratic seat has ended. The state Senate voted to reject the map, including 12 Republicans on the no side. Their concern was voting already started and that the map was created by outstate constultants and they didn’t have time to study what it meant. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote of the results of a study released in Nature put hard numbers to the algorithms in the social media platforms and their effect on the 2024 election.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day. Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side.

No, the algorithms were not giving people what they want. They were giving people what the tech bros wanted them to see. Hartmann reviewed the bias the tech bros have for the nasty guy. He then gave some recommendations: 1. Require algorithmic transparency – platforms must disclose how they weight political content and they must submit to independent audits. There is a bill to do this and it needs sustained public pressure. 2. Repeal or reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, “so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.” 3. The Justice Department must treat these companies as monopolies and break them up. The 2024 election was not free and fair. Back on May 1 NPR show Marketplace included an excerpt that is part of their series My Economy, in which individuals describe the money issues they face. The audio is under four minutes. This is about the economy of Lois Moore, retired. She inherited a big chunk of money from her mother and a rising stock market added much more. She saw that like billionaires, she had more money than she could ever use. So she decided to put a cap on her net worth and start making big donations to charities. She thinks she will adjust the limit downward in the coming years. Yes, this can be scary because so much was of her life was geared towards accumulating. Friends ask her whether she might regret giving so much away. Maybe. But she can’t foresee a lot of things. The market is based on fear and greed. She doesn’t want her life based on that. She wants contentment instead.