He ended up costing CBS a lot of money.
No amount disclosed for the settlement, the Lee Mendelson Film Productions announced that, "It would donate all proceeds to World Central Kitchen, the disaster-relief food non-profit founded by chef José Andrés."
Sweet,
Court To Bondi: Demanding Platforms Censor Speech And Bragging About It On Fox News Is, In Fact, A First Amendment Violation—Techdirt
To quote Buddy/Syndrome from the movie The Incredibles, "Oh, ho ho! You sly dog! You got me monologuing!"
Villains of this sort cannot resist monologuing.
For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of that mattered to the MAGA ecosystem, of course, which continued to treat a handful of out-of-context sternly worded emails from Biden officials as the greatest censorship regime in American history.
Then the Trump administration came in, and a funny thing happened. The same people who’d built entire careers around the supposed horrors of government pressure on tech platforms suddenly had nothing to say when the Attorney General of the United States went on Fox News to brag — brag! — about demanding Apple remove an app and Facebook take down a group, both because their content was critical of ICE enforcement.
On Friday, Judge Jorge L. Alonso of the Northern District of Illinois granted a preliminary injunction against DOJ and DHS, finding that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the government violated the First Amendment by coercing Facebook and Apple into suppressing protected speech. The ruling is short and direct in an almost embarrassingly straightforward way — largely because Pam Bondi and the rest of the government handed the plaintiffs most of their case on a silver platter, then held press conferences to make sure everyone knew about it.
………
The legal framework here is familiar territory for Techdirt readers. Bantam Books v. Sullivan from 1963 established that “thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings” against parties who don’t come around to the government’s preferred speech outcomes violate the First Amendment. 2024’s NRA v. Vullo reaffirmed and sharpened that principle, holding that “[g]overnment officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” The test, per Vullo, is whether government conduct, “viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff’s speech.”
Now, get an injunction against the head of the FCC.
I can't embed it, but Allison Gill got a copy from when it aired in Canada.
It's just some guy filming his TV, sot he quality is not great, but it is legible and audible.
There used to be a website in the early 2000s called Media Whores Online.
They would have had a field day with Bari Weiss.
(On edit, found a copy of the video on Archive.org)
Once again, Google has shown that its new motto is, "Be Evil," removing the ICE tracking app Red Dot from their app store. )
When juxtaposed with their recent attempts to make side loading apps impossible, it's even more evil.
There justification is that the masked abductor of random people is somehow a threatened class:
Both Google and Apple recently removed Red Dot, an app people can use to report sightings of ICE officials, from their respective app stores, 404 Media has found. The move comes after Apple removed ICEBlock, a much more prominent app, from its App Store on Thursday following direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials. Google told 404 Media it removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to these sorts of ICE-spotting apps—a veiled reference to ICE officials.
The move signals a broader crackdown on apps that are designed to keep communities safe by crowdsourcing the location of ICE officials. Authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September and who killed a detainee, searched his phone for various tracking apps. A long-running immigration support group on the ground in Chicago, where ICE is currently focused, told 404 Media some of its members use Red Dot.
………
The app allows people to report ICE presence or activity, along with details such as the location and time, according to Red Dot’s website. The app then notifies nearby community members, and users can receive alerts about ICE activity in their area, the website says.
This is totalitarian bullsh%$.
We really need to
I am referring, of course, to Jimmy Kimmel whose indefinite suspension ends tomorrow night.
Sinclair Broadcasting, whose right-wing Executive director David D. Smith was caught getting a blowjob from a prostitute in a company car, has announced that they will not carry the show.
This is par for the course for Sinclair Broadcasting, whose right-wing Executive director David D. Smith was caught getting a blowjob from a prostitute in a company car.
If you want to discuss Sinclair's actions, or perhaps put a comment into their file for a local station with the FCC, remember to mention that their right-wing Executive director David D. Smith was caught getting a blowjob from a prostitute in a company car.
4chan and Kiwi Farms are have sued the UK to block their enforcing the censorious and draconian Online Safety Act against them.
It appears that the UK ffice of Communications (Ofcom) has been making legal demands
Let’s be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. [Their community members are nasty pieces of work, with Kiwi Farms arguably being the worst such lot on the internet] Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They’re the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people wouldn’t shed a tear if they disappeared tomorrow.
But here’s the thing about free speech principles: they’re not just for the speech you like. And when it comes to the UK’s disastrous Online Safety Act, even trolls can make valid constitutional points.
Last week, the two sites teamed up to file a lawsuit in US federal court against Ofcom, the UK agency in charge of regulating internet speech under the OSA, claiming the regulator’s attempts to enforce British law against wholly American companies violate their constitutional rights. The case highlights the fundamental absurdity of the UK’s approach to internet regulation—and raises serious questions about what happens when every country decides it can regulate the global internet.The Complaint: A Surprisingly Coherent Constitutional Challenge
The 22-page complaint, filed in Washington D.C., doesn’t mince words about what Ofcom has been up to. According to the filing, Ofcom has been sending “legally binding information notices” to both sites demanding they comply with UK law, despite having no operations, infrastructure, or legal presence in Britain beyond being accessible to UK internet users.………
That’s worth pausing on. Ofcom’s first round of enforcement actions targeted exclusively American websites. One can argue that these four sites (the other two, SaSu—or Sanctioned Suicide—and Gab are also among the most controversial websites on the internet) can be seen as particularly problematic, but this sure does feel like an effort by the UK to regulate American companies.
………
The specific demands Ofcom has made are both breathtaking in their scope and chilling in their implications. According to the lawsuit, Ofcom has threatened both sites with:
civil fines, criminal charges, criminal fines, 6 months’ imprisonment when tried summarily, or even imprisonment for up to two years when tried on indictment.For 4chan specifically, the threats escalated over several months. The complaint details a series of increasingly aggressive communications:
On April 14, 2025, Ofcom sent a so-called “legally binding information notice” to 4chan… The 4chan Information Notice stated that failure to comply with it “may also constitute a criminal offence” and that failure to provide the requested information in readable form to Ofcom “may result in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and/or imprisonment for a term of up to two years, or a fine (or both).”
The lawsuit claims that this violates both sections of the Communications Decency Act and the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments of the US constitution, and that there was a war roughly 250 years ago that established that Britain has no soverignty over the United States of America.
They claim that the actions of Ofcom, because they are an attempt to regulate commercial entities in the United States, they are not covered by sovereign immunity.
My guess is that the courts will throw this out on the above grounds, it does seem to be an official government act by Ofcom, but we'll see.
On Tuesday, Stephen Colbert calls the CBS $16 million "settlement" with Donald Trump a, "Big fat bribe," in order to get approval for their (Paramont's) merger with Larry Ellison's kids, and on Thursday, CBS canceled the show, effective in 10 months.
CBS says that it's just about money, and they cannot make money on late night any more.
For a decade the comedian Stephen Colbert has mocked, ridiculed and eviscerated Donald Trump from every conceivable angle. On Thursday Colbert told his audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York that his popular late night TV show is being cancelled. “Yeah, I share your feelings,” he said in response to a chorus of boos.
The CBS network insisted that it had made “a purely financial decision” to wind up The Late Show next year. But others are not so sure. Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator who was a guest on Thursday’s show, tweeted: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
There are reasonable grounds for suspicion. Earlier this month CBS’s owner, Paramount Global, reached a $16m settlement with Trump over an interview on its current affairs strand 60 Minutes, removing a potential obstacle to the company’s $8bn sale to the Hollywood studio Skydance Media.
If the mega-merger goes ahead, a friend and ally of the US president, the billionaire Larry Ellison, could wield huge influence over the CBS news division as well as programmes ranging from South Park to Star Trek. The Late Show is sure to be seen by some as an example of obeying in advance.
Sure, Jan.
A tyrants cannot abide being made fun of, and CBS is busy, "Obeying in advance.:
It appears that in an attempt to ban work and sexually explicit books, the state schoolboard has banned the bible and Shakespaere.
It was only a matter of time, and I thought that it would be Texas or Florida that went first, but it's the birthplace of Stephen Colbert:
We’ve mostly steered clear of S.C. Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver’s effort to take over decisions about what books can and can’t be available in public schools, because we agree that schools shouldn’t offer books that are essentially how-to manuals for having sex.
And yes, a few such books actually have showed up in our schools — although schools generally have removed them as soon as they were made aware of them.
But as complaints have mounted about what critics call an unclear new regulation, and as state officials have refused to clarify any of the text, we’ve looked more closely at the rules that took effect Aug. 1 — and we’ve become concerned. Our concern isn’t that the regulation is unclear. It’s that at least parts of it are quite clear — and quite broad.
What’s unclear is whether the Board of Education intends to enforce its regulation as written, or if it will treat it as though it means what most people would assume it means if they read only the regulation — and not the sweeping definition in state law that it incorporates by reference but doesn't quote.
Teachers have been asking what seem like ridiculous questions designed simply to make a point: Can they still teach the works of William Shakespeare, or even include them in their libraries? What about the Bible? Can it be available in the library?
By our reading, the answers to those questions would be no. And that’s ridiculous.
As the Japanese say, "バカにつける薬はない".
At George Dawson Middle School in Southlake, Texas, they have censored the autobiography of George Dawson.
Yes, the same George Dawson.
They are doing this, because in his memoir, Dawson described a lynching, and in the Southlake Carrol Independent School District (ISD), they have a long and contentious history of racism, including videos of students chanting the N-word, discriminatory discipline, etc., so they don't like the idea of their students being shown what their ancestors did.
F%$# them:
You name a new school building after a man or woman, and decades later few remember who that person was. In the case of the late George Dawson of Dallas — he of George Dawson Middle School fame in Southlake’s Carroll ISD — the reason his name is on a school is something of a miracle.
Yet now we learn from Dallas Morning News Education Lab reporter Meghan Mangrum that a committee of district educators reviewed Dawson’s book to check for, in the words of Superintendent Lane Ledbetter, “age and content appropriateness for students.”
Students can still read most of the book. But for seventh graders any discussion of the most important chapter must instead be overseen by a teacher as part of a guided discussion. To me, it sounds like the book’s key chapter might not get read at all, but instead be summarized by the teacher.
Critics call this a book ban. The Carroll district, already suffering image-wise from a slew of battles over race relations in its schools, fights this labeling. I’d say it’s more of a book censoring than a banning. Is there a difference? I’m not sure.
………
It’s a remarkably embarrassing situation for one of the state’s premier school districts. If ever a book’s story needs to be told, it’s this — Life Is So Good, by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman.
"One of the state’s premier school districts?" Yeah, maybe. I have been told that the schools were remarkably good in Omelas* too.
What they are banning is the autobiography of a man, the grandson of slaves, who was abandoned by the Texas education system in his youth and only learned to read when he was 98 years old.
A friend oh his was lynched on the basis of false accusations, and he writes about this, but in the Carrols ISD, there can be no mention of this, because any reference to the evil that was done by the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents of the white citizens of the district must be suppressed.
It must be suppressed so that students can continue to chant the N-word.
I guess that they think that anything else is "Critical Race Theory."
Can we please give Texas back to Mexico?
*You don't get the reference? Seriously? Read a book occasionally, or at least this short story.
Florida School Board Bans Book about Book Bans—The Tallahassee Democrat about the Indian River County School Board having their heads so far up their ass that they are Klein Bottles
So, they ban books, and then they ban books that discuss banning books, because that might lead to reading banned books, then they will ban book about books about banning books ………
Rinse, lather, repeat, and eventually all we are left with is video of George
W. reading My Pet Goat.*
I find it hard to imagine that this could get any more absurd,
but I put that down to my lack of imagination. I am sure it will become
even more absurd.
Florida, man!
School officials here have banned a book about book banning.
The School Board last month voted to remove "Ban This Book" by Alan Gratz from its shelves, overruling its own district book-review committee's decision to keep it.
The children's novel follows a fictional fourth grader who creates a secret banned books locker library after her school board pulled a multitude of titles off the shelves.
School Board members said they disliked how it referenced other books that had been removed from schools and accused it of "teaching rebellion of school board authority," as described in the formal motion to oust it.
The book, which had been in two Indian River County elementary schools and a middle school, was challenged by Jennifer Pippin, president of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national conservative group that has become one of the loudest advocates for removing books they deem inappropriate.
President a local chapter of Moms for Liberty? Who is she and her husband
having a menage a trois with?
The book has also been challenged at least one other time in Florida, in Clay County, but school officials there decided to keep it in circulation.
Gratz, its author, called the Indian River County decision "incredibly ironic."
I would call it profoundly absurd, to the degree that I would expect the
school board members to turn into rhinoceroses. (The rhinoceros is
actually an allegory for fascism in the play of that name, so in a very real
way, they already have turned into rhinoceroses.)
Can we please give Florida back to Spain?
— PirateWenchArt (@PirateWenchArt) January 13, 2024
Just so you know, when Bill O'Reilly is complaining that the Florida book censorship law is banning his book, the response, It's called Karma, and it is pronounced, "Haha, fuck you," is an appropriote response, and almost 100% pitch perfect.
To be 100% pitch perfect, the word, "Bitch," would need to be added after the word, "Karma."
Karen Smith, who was chosen as the president of the new Democratic-led board, wanted to make a symbolic gesture after the former GOP-led board passed a policy prohibiting "sexualized content" that led to two book bans and 60 other challenges in the county. https://t.co/Q5J7nwt6Og
— The Recount (@therecount) December 6, 2023
The new board will be busy, among other things trying to claw back a 6 figure bonus that the old board gave to the incompetent former superintendent, but swearing in on a pile of banned books.
I approve.
Just when I thought that the the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir™ could not get any more petty, I learn that Elon Musk directed the staff at the company formerly known as Twitter to put a delay in for any website that he does not like.
The big lies of our society today are, "I'll respect you in the morning, "It's not about the money," I won't cum in your mouth," "This will only hurt a bit," "It's about the children," and Elon Musk saying, "I'm a free-speech absolutist."
I'm beginning to think that Elon Musk is a very poorly coded artificial intelligence program:
The company formerly known as Twitter [Nice burn there] has been slowing the speed with which users could access links to the New York Times, Facebook and other news organizations and online competitors, a move that appeared targeted at companies that have drawn the ire of owner Elon Musk.
Users who clicked a link on Musk’s website, now called X, for one of the targeted websites were made to wait about five seconds before seeing the page, according to tests conducted Tuesday by The Washington Post.
The delayed websites included X’s online rivals Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Substack, as well as the Reuters wire service and the Times. All of them have previously been singled out by Musk for ridicule or attack.
On Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was first published, X began reversing the throttling on some of the sites, dropping the delay times back to zero. It was unknown if all the throttled websites had normal service restored.
I kind of get it for his competitors, but the New York Times?
I think we have the lamest person in the news this week, and between Donald Trump and Ammon Bundy, this is a pretty f%$#ing high bar.
The Llano County Council wanted to censor books in their library, and when the courts made that difficult, they tried to shut-down their library system, but they backed down after an international outcry.
I would expect them to continue to attempt to censor books and shut down their libraries once attention has shifted elsewhere, because the Talibaptists never give up:
A rural county in Texas will keep its libraries open after leaders considered shutting them down in the wake of a federal judge’s order to replace 17 banned books on their shelves, officials here decided Thursday.
A federal judge in March had ordered Llano County to return books that had been removed from library shelves after complaints from a local conservative group as part of an ongoing First Amendment court case. Most were related to teens, sex education and race, but they also include jokey “fart” books and Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book “In the Night Kitchen.”
On Thursday, the Llano County Commissioners Court discussed — meeting in a private session — whether to “continue or cease operations” of their three libraries, ultimately deciding not to close them.
First, if you are banning a book by Maurice Sendak, you are wrong.
Second, these folks also want history books about slavery and the civil rights protests, because it might hurt their feelings.
F%$# them with Cheney's dick.
Can we give Texas back to Mexico?
You may recall that Puffin had decided to rewrite Roadl Dahl classics to remove problematic language from his stories, which ignores the fact that part of the allure of his wonderfully twisted works is exactly that.
Now it appears that people with eBooks have discovered that their copies had been replaced by the Bowlderized version.
If you are dedicated to eBook readers, find a way to hack the copy protection and save a permanent copy that won't be taken away at the whim of a publisher, the criminal provisions of the DMCA be damned.
Just to remind you, in 2009, Amazon reached into people's Kindles to remove their copies of the George Orwell book 1984.
Talk about throwing things in the Memory Holw. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")
In Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas and Ft. Worth, education officials at the George Dawson Middle School are looking to ban the autobiography of George Dawson.
Yes, these are the SAME George Dawsons, so they are considering banning the book written by the guy who they named the school after.
Why? Racism, because it always comes down to racism, and they are concerned that any discussion of lynching might give some white people a sad, and Mr. Dawson related how his best friend was lynched:
You name a new school building after a man or woman, and decades later few remember who that person was. In the case of the late George Dawson of Dallas — he of George Dawson Middle School fame in Southlake’s Carroll ISD — the reason his name is on a school is something of a miracle.
Yet now we learn from Dallas Morning News Education Lab reporter Meghan Mangrum that a committee of district educators reviewed Dawson’s book to check for, in the words of Superintendent Lane Ledbetter, “age and content appropriateness for students.”
………
Students can still read most of the book. But for seventh graders any discussion of the most important chapter must instead be overseen by a teacher as part of a guided discussion. To me, it sounds like the book’s key chapter might not get read at all, but instead be summarized by the teacher.
Critics call this a book ban. The Carroll district, already suffering image-wise from a slew of battles over race relations in its schools, fights this labeling. I’d say it’s more of a book censoring than a banning. Is there a difference? I’m not sure.
This has not come up in the first 20 years Dawson’s name has been on that building.
I never met George Dawson, but I studied his life on the day he was buried in July 2001 by reading his book. And it’s a most remarkable book.
………
In summary, he was the grandson of a former slave who learned to read at age 98.
The Dallas man became a symbol of literacy worldwide, appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show, and being profiled in newspapers and magazines. He lived to 103, long enough to know that his name was on a building. And yes, he could read it.
What follows is the specific story that some Carroll leaders believe is inappropriate for 12-year-olds. You can decide.The boy in town he most looked up to was a friend named Pete, one of the finest baseball players in East Texas. Pete once gave George the ball from Pete’s game-winning hit with the advice: “You practice with it, George. You’ll be a hitter someday, too.”
………
When George was 10, he was downtown in Marshall with his father when Pete was accused of getting a white woman pregnant.
“It wasn’t me!” Pete screamed as a mob encircled him. “I didn’t touch her! Lord, let me go!”
The true story is that the woman became pregnant with her white boyfriend, and the baby’s birth months later would prove that. But to avoid the wrath of her father, she blamed Pete.
………As the lynching took place, George buried his head against his father’s chest. Pete’s neck broke instantly.
“His eyes were open,” George writes. “Pete was still looking at me, and I knew that he alwways would be.”
You know, if the parents of George Dawson students are so concerned about their children thinking that they are racist, perhaps they should stop being racist.
Your white hood is showing.
LA Times reporter Russ Mitchell, looks at Elon Musk's claim that he wants to buy Twitter to support free speech, and notes that Elon Musk has a record of vociferiously attacking speech when it something that he does not want people to hear about him.
Republicans support the bid because they think that with the Apartheid emerald mine heir in charge, Donald Trump will return to the platform. (Probably true, toxic narcissist professional courtesy)
He has used non-disclosure agreements and the fact that people do not want to sue someone who can hire white-shoe lawyers by the bushel to stifle criticism, and he has used his Twitter induce his followers to harass and threaten people who say things about him that he does not like:
Elon Musk might be serious about taking over Twitter. Or his hostile bid might be just a rich man’s whim, a distraction he’ll abandon when it begins to bore him. Or maybe he’s punking everybody.
………
In his bid to buy Twitter, he opened with a flourish that suggested levity, working the number “420" into his proffered share price. The weed joke evidently fell flat: The board created a “poison pill” provision to deter him.
Now, in need of support from shareholders and potential financiers, he has turned to rhetoric, laying out a grand if fuzzy vision for the Twitter he would build.
Calling himself a “free speech absolutist,” he said he wants to make the social network what he regards as a friendlier place for free expression by “being cautious about” permanent bans and loosening its content restrictions. “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy,” he tweeted Tuesday.
That is the most stupid and facile thing that I have heard from Musk for a while, which is saying a lot.
This is, after all, the guy who wanted to move PayPal from Linux to Windows in the late 1990s, when even Microsoft was not make Hotmail work on Windows until nearly a decade later.
He also said he would make Twitter transparent about its inner workings, open-sourcing the algorithm it uses to sort and amplify tweets so it’s no longer a “black box.”Github is owned by Microsoft, which shielded fellow billionaire and serial sexual abuser Bill Gates for decades.
………
Start with transparency. According to Musk, Twitter posts are “mysteriously promoted or demoted with no insight into what’s going on” and who or what is making the decisions. “Having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things, I think this can be quite dangerous,” he said at the TED conference last week. He suggested posting Twitter code on the open source developer site GitHub.
There’s some irony around Musk’s critical use of the term “black box.” Tesla has its own algorithmic black box in its cars — the one responsible for automated driving.
And THAT black box continues to kill and injure people.
………Physician, heal thyself.
“We would like him to be a little more transparent with respect to the safety of his Teslas,” said Alain Kornhauser, who heads the autonomous vehicle program at Princeton University. “A lot of us think they’re safe. We’d like to do an independent evaluation and offer a second opinion. I think it would help him and help the world.”
To get details on a car’s performance before and after a crash, Tesla owners, police and lawyers have had to have a subpoena issued to compel the company to share data.
And then there is his response to whistleblowers and other critics.
………
Musk did not reply to requests for comment. Almost alone among major public companies, Tesla does not have a media relations department.
Then there’s the question of Musk’s alleged free-speech absolutism. When it comes to the speech of others, particularly his employees and critics, his commitment has been anything but absolute. Far from defending their right to speak up, he has sought to stifle them with legal muzzles or responded with firings, lawsuits or even the hiring of private detectives.
Cristina Balan, who raised alarms about vehicle safety while working as an engineer at Tesla, is one of several whistleblowers who has encountered Musk’s wrath after going public. Shortly after scheduling a meeting with Musk to make her case, she was fired, and the company began slipping false information about her to a reporter. Balan’s defamation case against Tesla is still in the courts. “Musk is an absolutist about absolutism, which is the exact opposite of free speech,” Balan told The Times.
Although many companies press employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, Tesla has been a particularly profligate user of them, and of arbitration agreements that prevent those suing the company from making their allegations part of the public record. Tesla requires customers testing its Full Self-Driving technology to sign nondisclosure agreements that say they should “selectively” choose what they post to YouTube because “there are a lot of people that want Tesla to fail.”
………
Critics outside the company are hardly immune. When Tesla ran into image problems in China, the company responded by asking the Chinese government to censor critical posts by social media users there, Bloomberg reported last year.
………
Musk sometimes paints a bull’s-eye on journalists who report negative news about Tesla. He once accused Business Insider reporter Linette Lopez of using inside information to benefit short sellers who were betting against Tesla. Insider trading is a crime sometimes enforced by the SEC.
………
It may be that Musk, if his long-shot pursuit of Twitter comes to fruition, prioritizes unfettered speech and transparency for its users and employees. If so, it will be a departure from the way he has operated to date.
I do not get why this guy gets a pass on everything.
It is not deserved.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has has been permabanned from Twitter.
Mixed emotions. I'd much rather that she have been arrested for her role in the January 6 insurrection.
Also, I am rather dubious of the power being exerted by a for profit over our discourse. (Same applies to Rupert Murdoch)
In today's episode of, "Don't say the quiet part outside," after an uproar over two of its members suggested that they burn controversial books, and the ensuing uproar, the Spotsylvania school board has reversed itself on banning books:
A school board in Virginia has reversed a recent decision to remove “sexually explicit” books from school libraries after the move stirred community outrage and drew harsh national criticism — especially over two board members’ apparent suggestion to burn the books.
The Spotsylvania County School Board voted 5 to 2 Tuesday to rescind its decision, a week after two parents complained about inappropriate content. At the Nov. 8 meeting, the board unanimously directed Schools Superintendent S. Scott Baker to reconsider whether every sexually explicit book in school libraries should be kept or permanently removed — forcing a team of about three dozen staffers, including all of the district’s librarians, to start poring through tens of thousands of titles.Board members Kirk Twigg and Rabih Abuismail voted against rescinding the decision.
Twigg and Abuismail were the two who said that the books should be burned.
On Monday, dozens of students, parents and teachers turned out to show their displeasure with the board. Some hoisted signs reading “Give back the books!” and “Books not bonfires,” according to the Free Lance-Star.It's good that the Talibaptists are such a toxic mix of arrogance and stupidity.
Many Spotsylvanians spoke during a public comment period that stretched for more than four hours. A high-schooler told the board that censorship is “contagious and leads to much worse,” according to the Free Lance-Star. A county librarian added, “If you have a worldview that can be undone by a novel, let me suggest that the problem is not the novel,” the Free Lance-Star reported.
Close to midnight, after public comment wound down, board member Baron Braswell proposed that the previous vote to remove sexually explicit texts “be rescinded immediately,” Braswell said in an interview, “and that was basically it.”
If they had just not talked about burning books, the story would have been buried on page 6, but they had to say what they honestly believed, because they were incapable of understanding that those beliefs are thoroughly repugnant.
The Spottsylvania County, Virginia school board decided to ban "sexually explicit" books, which in this case, it means anything about LGBTQ people.
This is not particularly newsworthy, but two members of the school board called for these books to be burned, which is both notable and completely bat-sh%$ insane:
The Spotsylvania County School Board has directed staff to begin removing books that contain “sexually explicit” material from library shelves and report on the number of books that have been removed at a special called meeting next week.
The directive came after a parent raised concerns at the School Board’s meeting Monday about books available through the Riverbend High School’s digital library app.
………
The board voted 6–0 to order the removal. Berkeley District representative Erin Grampp was not in attendance for the vote on that issue.
Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.
“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”
………
Twigg said he would like to broaden the criteria for identifying objectionable books.
“There are some bad, evil-related material that we have to be careful of and look at,” he said, without elaborating.
"Evil related material," huh?
Unfortunately, too many people from the sane end of the body politic look at people like Abuismail and Twigg, and their response is, "In spite of the harshness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."
These people are not the opposition, they are the enemies of the Republic.
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A member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and a fan of Bernie who thinks Neoliberal (DLC/New Dem) trickle down conomics sucks.Mechanical Engineer with a background in defense, electronics packaging, medical & food equipment, transportation, and manufacturing.
In my spare time (Hah!), I am the developer of the Firefox addon, bbCode for Web Extensions (bbCodeWebEx).
I have two cats, a black cat, and a gray and white long hair cat, who keep me on my toes. (Because he keeps attacking my feet)
I am a Jew and a Zionist, who is married to a woman with exquisitely bad taste in men, and I have two remarkable children with her.
