At $25 million and counting, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sits atop the largest tower of campaign contributions of any Democratic politician in America. But this monument to his prodigious fund-raising strength also reveals one of his greatest vulnerabilities, especially if he harbors presidential ambitions.
He has virtually no small donors.
Since the beginning of 2015, Mr. Cuomo has raised over 99 percent of his campaign money from donations larger than $1,000 and nearly 99.9 percent of his funds from donors who gave at least $200, according to an analysis by The New York Times. At one point last year, Mr. Cuomo went six months without reporting a single individual donor who gave less than $200.
“You almost have to try to have that few,” said Michael Whitney, who served as Senator Bernie Sanders’s digital fund-raising manager on his 2016 presidential campaign. He said that if Mr. Cuomo were to run for president and maintain his “comically absent number of small donors,” it could cripple him in an era where both parties, but particularly Democrats, have become reliant on an army of small givers to compete at the national level.
(emphasis mine)
This is f%$#ed up on so many levels, it buggers the mind.
I am so hoping that he loses the primary in 2018, though there are 25 million reasons why this is unlikely.
He the epitome of everything that is wrong with “centrist” Democratic hypocrites.
It’s a nice to see someone turning chat bots against the scammers:
Thousands of online scammers around the globe are being fooled by artificial intelligence bots posing as New Zealanders and created by the country’s internet watchdog to protect it from “phishing” scams.
Chatbots that use distinct New Zealand slang such as “aye” have been deployed by Netsafe in a bid to engage scammers in protracted email exchanges that waste their time, gather intelligence and lure them away from actual victims.
yber crime costs New Zealanders around NZ$250m annually. Computer programmers at Netsafe spent more than a year designing the bots as part of their Re:scam initiative, which went live on Wednesday.
Within 24 hours 6,000 scam emails had been sent to the Re:scam email address and there were 1000 active conversations taking place between scammers and chatbots.
So far, the longest exchange between a scammer and a chatbot pretending to be a New Zealander was 20 emails long.
The bots use humour, grammatical errors and local slang to make their “personas” believable, said Netsafe CEO Martin Cocker. As the programme engages in more fake conversations with scammers overseas, its vocabulary, intelligence and personality traits will grow.
Here’s hoping that the AIs will spend their time battling each other, and ,leave the rest of us alone.
The Myth of the Kindly General Lee (The Atlantic) Lee not only supported slavery, but he was a particularly heinous slave owner who argued against the black franchise post war, and turned a blind eye to white supremacist violence by students at Washington College (Now Washington and Lee University) when he was president there.
Advocated for the creation of a standing permanent army run by and for the Federalist party.
Called for the use of military force to prevent Thomas Jefferson becoming president after he was elected.
Attempted to foment a coup against the US government.
Was a slave trader, not an abolitionist.
Attempted to put that day’s big finance in charge of the government.
Hamilton was a bad guy, and here is the money quote of this article:
But the agenda is hidden, because in America, no political leader, not even Donald Trump, can credibly come right out and pronounce democracy a bad thing and agitate for rule by big finance. And the reason for that is that Alexander Hamilton, despite his success in structuring Wall Street, lost the battle against American democracy. Thank God for that.
He is a lawyer for the Public Knowledge, which advocates for, “Policies that serve the public interest.”
He lives and breaths this stuff, and he has looked at the merger between AT&T and Time Warner, and the rumored remedies that the US Department of Justice is demanding, and concludes that the remedies demanded by the government, including requiring a divestiture of CNN, have extensive precedent and are reasonable in the context of the industry:
I want to start by applauding Randal Stephenson for coming out quickly and denying the rumors that DoJ asked them to sell CNN as the price of getting the merger done. At the same time, however, he acknowledged that negotiations were “complicated,” and that he and recently confirmed Asst A.G. for Antitrust Makan Delrahim were still “getting to know each other” and “figure out the ask on the other side of the table.” He also made it clear that, if DoJ does challenge, AT&T is prepared to go to court and are confident they will win.
In fact, demanding divestiture of either the must have content or the DIRECTV distribution platform is precisely the remedy you would expect if you believe the deal presents significant harm because of the vertical integration issues. That’s been the position of my employer, Public Knowledge, which has opposed the transaction since AT&T announced the deal. (That predates Trump’s election, for those of you wondering.) If you want a more detailed understanding of the theory of the harms, you can find it in my boss Gene Kimmelman’s testimony to Congress here. While generally true that vertical deals are hard to challenge, the cable industry has long been something of an exception, and the remedy here is similar to what the FTC imposed on the AT&T/Turner deal in 1996, where the FTC imposed stock divestitures and restructuring to eliminate the voting interest of John Malone and Liberty Media because of Malone/Liberty’s ownership TCI, which was then the largest cable operator in the United States (25% national market share). Given the massive criticism of “behavioral” remedies and a call to return to “structural” remedies from the right and the left, it’s unsurprising that DoJ would want actual divestiture rather than go the Comcast/NBCU consent decree route.
I would add that consent decrees tend to have limited effect over the long run, and that Public Knowledge has opposed this merger since before Trump’s election.
While a lot of people have tried to cast opposition to the deal as political interference by Trump and his Evil Minions™, it is clear that opposition could be easily justified.
This might be another case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, or it might be a vendetta by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is under investigation for involvement in an alleged plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident cleric living in the US and fly him to an island prison in Turkey in return for $15m, it was reported on Friday.
………
The new allegation, that Flynn and his son engaged in a conspiracy to arrange the rendition of Fethullah Gülen to the Erdoğan government – which accuses the cleric of plotting an abortive coup in July 2016 – could if confirmed result in even more serious charges.
In September, the Wall Street Journal reported a meeting about the plan, in which former CIA director James Woolsey is said to have participated. Friday’s report describes a second meeting involving both Flynns at the 21 Club restaurant, a prohibition-era New York speakeasy patronised by Trump, in mid-December. According to “people familiar with the investigation”, it was at this encounter that the $15m payment was discussed.
On appeal, the decision of the UK Employment Tribunal to classify drivers to be employees of Uber has been upheld on appeal:
Uber suffered another setback in its biggest market outside the United States after a British employment tribunal rejected the ride-hailing company’s argument that its drivers are self-employed.
The decision on Friday, which affirmed a ruling issued last year, means that Uber will have to ensure that its drivers in Britain receive a minimum wage and paid time off. That creates problems for a common hiring model in the so-called gig economy that relies on workers who do not have formal contracts.
Companies argue that such labor practices increase flexibility on both sides of the hiring equation. But critics counter that the system is exploitative and deprives employees of important safeguards like unemployment insurance.
The ruling was the second blow to Uber’s business here in recent months. In September, London’s transport authority barred the company from operating in the British capital.
In the case before the employment tribunal, two men, James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, had challenged Uber on behalf of a group of 19 drivers, saying that the service had denied them basic protections by classifying them as self-employed. Uber countered with an argument it has used around the world: Its drivers were independent contractors.
“You can hide behind technology, but the laws are there, and they need to be obeyed and respected,” Mr. Aslam, 36, said in an interview after the tribunal issued its decision. “The impact of this ruling could affect thousands of drivers, and not just drivers but millions of workers across the U.K.”
The core of Uber’s business model is that they can make other people cover the bulk of their costs, because ………Internet.
That they are finally getting push-back on this is heartening.
When Danny Greg first moved to San Francisco to work at Github in 2012, he used to get high-fives in the street from strangers when he wore his company hoodie.
These days, unless he’s at an investor event, he’s cautious about wearing branded clothing that might indicate he’s a techie. He’s worried about the message it sends.
Greg is one of many people working in tech who are increasingly self-conscious about how the industry – represented by consumer-facing tech titans like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter and Uber – is perceived: as underregulated, overly powerful companies filled with wealthy tech bros and “brilliant assholes” with little regard for the local communities they occupy. Silicon Valley has taken over from Wall Street as the political bogeyman of choice, turning tech workers – like it or not – into public ambassadors for the 1%.
“I would never say I worked at Facebook,” said one 30-year-old software engineer who left the company last year to pursue an alternative career. Instead, at dinner parties he would give purposefully vague responses and change the subject. “There’s this song and dance you learn to play because people are quick to judge.”
Like Wall Street before, the tech industry is a justifiable punchbag. “MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”
He really was. 20 years later I am tired of people defending him. Impeachment was bullsh%$ but he was a bad man and a bad Democrat and a bad president.
Princeton Digs Deep Into Its Fraught Racial History (New York Times) Princeton was always the Ivy of choice for segreationists, see Wilson, Woodrow. It first graduated blacks in 1947, and had only 7 black undergrads in 1962.
German officials celebrate doubled Twitter character limit (AP) Well, I can see how this might be an issue when describing the impact of Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz on a Niederflurfoerderfahrzeugfuehrer working on beef products. (Real German words.)
The point of the Brazile story isn’t that the people who “rigged” the primary were afraid of losing an election. It’s that they weren’t afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn’t believe in them anymore.
If you’re not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.
That Republicans have believed this is not a surprise. Disdain for the hoi polloi is at the core of conservative ideology, and has been since before Plato’s Republic.
The neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has embraced this as well.
We see it in opaque and confusing programs (Obamacare), “nudge” theory, unaccountable “experts” running our lives (ISDS, Fed, etc.).
Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore. It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing. “He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.” Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear. “I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did. Two of Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge. Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.
………
Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.
………
The legal age of consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16. Under Alabama law in 1979, and today, a person who is at least 19 years old who has sexual contact with someone older than 12 and younger than 15 has committed sexual abuse in the second degree. Sexual contact is defined as touching of sexual or intimate parts. The crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.
Moore, of course, is claiming that it’s all a political hit job.
Me, I have a simpler explanation: You are a skeevy perv.
If you are wondering why this is happening now, you could put it down to happenstance, or increased awareness following l’affaire Weinstein, but I have a simpler explanation: God hates you, Roy Moore.
Donald Trump came into office promising a restrictive new approach to immigration and there has been little question about his intention to follow through — with one seeming exception. Despite its enthusiastic rhetoric about the H-1B program, which provides temporary visas to high-skilled workers, the administration failed to make significant changes in time to impact the program’s annual lottery this April, leaving some who had anticipated action fuming. It has also declined to take up any of the legislative proposals for H-1B overhaul.
But a crackdown has been in the works, albeit more quietly. Starting this summer, employers began noticing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications. Cases that would have sailed through the approval process in earlier years ground to a halt under requests for new paperwork. The number of challenges — officially known as “requests for evidence” or RFEs — are up 44 percent compared to last year, according to statistics from USCIS. The percentage of H-1B applications that have resulted in RFEs this year are at the highest level they’ve been since 2009, and by absolute number are considerably higher than any year for which the agency provided statistics.
The H-1B program is controversial largely because IT firms based in India have used it to hire for rote computer programming jobs. These firms, like Infosys Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., have been working to reduce their reliance on the program, in anticipation of a less receptive political landscape. The overall number of H-1B applications dropped this year for the first time in five years. The skeptical eye the government is taking to applications has extended to all types of employers, according to immigration lawyers. Many are rethinking their own use of H-1B as a result.
The H1B program was intended to allow for someone to be hired if they have a skill set that could not be found in the US.
The H1B program does not work that way in reality. It’s actually a source of cheap labor, and a way to lower wages generally in the industry.
Donald Trump is right on this, and the delicate snowflakes who are experiencing butt hurt over this are wrong.
Seriously? Send a nude picture of myself to Mark Zuckerberg and his Evil Minions™?
Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in an attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse.
Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner (or ex-partner) might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be “hashed”. This means that the company converts the image into a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to identify and block any attempts to re-upload that same image.
Facebook is piloting the technology in Australia in partnership with a government agency headed up by the e-safety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, who told ABC it would allow victims of “image-based abuse” to take action before pictures were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” she told the Australian broadcaster.
I gotta figure that if you send Facebook your nude pix, you will shortly be seeing a lot of ads for penis enlargement, boob jobs, body hair removal, or anal bleaching.
A socialist beat the House whip with no support from the party and is singing Solidarity Forever at his victory party, we can do this everywhere https://t.co/BVW9wOmW5b
Jersey is firmly blue, and outgoing Republican Governor Chris Christie is well past his sell by date, and the polls predicted a romp, so this is not a surprise.
In the Governor’s race, Ralph Northam beat Ed Gillespie by 9% beating the polls by 6%.
Further down ticket, the Democrats have picked up at least 14 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, with 4 as-yet-uncalled close races possibly flipping the chamber.
Particularly heartening is the fact that Virginia’s first transgender person to win an election, defeated a Republican who is arguably the most virulent anti-LGBT bigot in the state house:
Danica Roem, who will be Virginia’s first openly transgender elected official, defeated Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), a culture warrior who opposes LGBT rights. Elizabeth Guzman, who raised more money than any Democratic candidate except for Hurst, unseated Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter (R-Woodbridge).
