UNITED STATES - AUGUST 9: President Joe Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., arrive for The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 bill signing on the South Lawn of the White House, which provides funding for the semiconductor industry, on Tuesday, August 9, 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
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Still fresh in my mind. Joe was telling us that the IRS targets the rich millionaires. With the 87,000 agents they can target the billionaires. Well guess what? Again we were lied to. It’s mostly the middle class that they go after. Why would this change?
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is targeting low-wage working-class Americans, as well as those in the middle class, with audits while earners making a million or more annually are reviewed at a lower rate, a report detailing federal data reveals.
The data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University shows the odds of the IRS auditing a millionaire, in the traditional way carried out by revenue agents or tax auditors, was just 1.1 percent.
The egg section at a grocery in Redondo Beach. The average retail price for a dozen large eggs jumped to $7.37 in California this week, up from $4.83 at the beginning of December and $2.35 at this time last year.
(Jay Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Views: 35
Pampering Chickens cost Californians over $7.00 a dozen. So what’s next? Air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter? I was upset when a dozen of eggs cost $2.89 last week. But compared to California that’s dirt cheap.
The average retail price for a dozen large eggs jumped to $7.37 in California this week, up from $4.83 at the beginning of December and just $2.35 at this time last year, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show. This is being blamed on the bird flu.
Beside price gouging, I think cage free is another reason. In Ohio I saw that the cage free eggs are $3.99 average. This time last year eggs were $2.35 in California. Ohio $.098. You tell me why we see the big difference.
Gloria Moore grew up in Russell City, Calif., an unincorporated parcel near San Francisco Bay that was bulldozed in the 1960s through eminent domain.Credit...Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times
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Show me the money. Non slave state is now looking at a million each. I say 10 million. Yes since it’s California’s money, I’m feeling generous. The state set up a commission to see what they should pay each person. Well more was added to the mix.
The task force has identified five areas — housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care — in discussions for compensation. For example, from 1933 to 1977, when it comes to housing discrimination, the task force estimates compensation of around $569 billion, with $223,200 per person.
So when you look at the total was bumped up to 1 million per person, do the math. Over 2 trillion dollars would be the total cost. I’m sure the legislature will just say raise taxes. Yeah right.
It’s a start. Dell to Phase Out All Computer Chips Produced in China. No they’re not coming to the USA, but they’re pulling out of China by 2024. So it’s a start. As you know, China is the Progressives favorite, replacing Russia. We see that HP has also announced that they will be leaving China.
Nikkei Asia reports that Dell has told its suppliers to significantly reduce the number of components in its products that are “made in China” in an effort to diversify its supply chain as concerns over tensions between the US and China grow in the tech community. According to sources, the company has also informed its suppliers that it aims to stop using chips made in China by 2024. Dell reportedly plans to manufacture all chips used in its products in plants outside of China by 2024.
Apple reportedly plans to start making its MacBook notebooks in Vietnam by mid-2023, which means the company will have some alternative non-China production bases for all of its major product lines.
NOTE: The AP is a leftist organization. I will mark some more obvious leftist blather in the body of the story. —TPR
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is heading to the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday, his first trip there as president after two years of hounding by Republicans who have hammered him as soft on border security while the number of migrants crossing spirals.
Biden is due to spend a few hours in El Paso, Texas, currently the biggest corridor for illegal crossings, due in large part to Nicaraguans fleeing repression, crime and poverty in their country. They are among migrants from four countries who are now subject to quick expulsion under new rules enacted by the Biden administration in the past week that drew strong criticism from immigration advocates.
The president is expected to meet with border officials to discuss migration as well as the increased trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which are driving skyrocketing numbers of overdoses in the U.S.
Biden will visit the El Paso County Migrant Services Center and meet with nonprofits and religious groups that support migrants arriving to the U.S. It is not clear whether Biden will talk to any migrants.
“The president’s very much looking forward to seeing for himself firsthand what the border security situation looks like,” said John Kirby, White House national security spokesman. “This is something that he wanted to see for himself.”
Joe Biden
Biden’s announcement on border security and his visit to the border are aimed in part at quelling the political noise and blunting the impact of upcoming investigations into immigration promised by House Republicans. But any enduring solution will require action by the sharply divided Congress, where multiple efforts to enact sweeping changes have failed in recent years.
Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas offered faint praise for Biden’s decision to visit the border, and even that was notable in the current political climate.
“He must take the time to learn from some of the experts I rely on the most, including local officials and law enforcement, landowners, nonprofits, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s officers and agents, and folks who make their livelihoods in border communities on the front lines of his crisis,” Cornyn said.
From El Paso, Biden will continue south to Mexico City, where he and the leaders of Mexico and Canada will gather on Monday and Tuesday for a North American leaders summit. Immigration is among the items on the agenda.
The challenge facing the U.S. on its southern border “is something that is not unique to the United States. It’s gripping the hemisphere. And a regional challenge requires a regional solution,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC’s “This Week” before joining Biden on the trip.
In El Paso, where migrants congregate at bus stops and in parks before traveling on, border patrol agents have stepped up security before Biden’s visit.
“I think they’re trying to send a message that they’re going to more consistently check people’s documented status, and if you have not been processed they are going to pick you up,” said Ruben Garcia of the Annunciation House aid group in El Paso.
Migrants and asylum-seekers fleeing violence and persecution have increasingly found that protections in the United States are available primarily to those with money or the savvy to find someone to vouch for them financially.
Jose Natera, a Venezuelan migrant in El Paso who hopes to seek asylum in Canada, said he has no prospects for finding a U.S. sponsor and that he’s now reluctant to seek asylum in the U.S. because he’s afraid of being sent to Mexico.
Mexico “is a terrible country where there is crime, corruption, cartels and even the police persecute you,” he said. “They say that people who think about entering illegally won’t have a chance, but at the same time I don’t have a sponsor. … I came to this country to work. I didn’t come here to play.”
The numbers of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically during Biden’s first two years in office. There were more than 2.38 million stops during the year that ended Sept. 30, the first time the number topped 2 million. The administration has struggled to clamp down on crossings, reluctant to take hard-line measures that would resemble those of the Trump administration.
The policy changes announced this past week are Biden’s biggest move yet to contain illegal border crossings and will turn away tens of thousands of migrants arriving at the border. At the same time, 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela will get the chance to come to the U.S. legally as long as they travel by plane, get a sponsor and pass background checks.
The U.S. will also turn away migrants who do not seek asylum first in a country they traveled through en route to the U.S.
The changes were welcomed by some, particularly leaders in cities where migrants have been massing. But Biden was excoriated by immigrant advocate groups, which accused him of taking measures modeled after those of the former president.
“I do take issue with comparing us to Donald Trump,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, pointing to some of his most maligned policies, including the separation of migrant children from their parents.
“This is not that president,” she said.
For all of his international travel over his 50 years in public service, Biden has not spent much time at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The only visit that the White House could point to was Biden’s drive by the border while he was campaigning for president in 2008. He sent Vice President Kamala Harris to El Paso in 2021, but she was criticized for largely bypassing the action, because El Paso wasn’t the center of crossings that it is now.
President Barack Obama made a 2011 trip to El Paso, where he toured border operations and the Paso Del Norte international bridge, but he was later criticized for not going back as tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.
Trump, who made hardening immigration a signature issue, traveled to the border several times. During one visit, he crammed into a small border station to inspect cash and drugs confiscated by agents. During a trip to McAllen, Texas, then the center of a growing crisis, he made one of his most often repeated claims, that Mexico would pay to build a border wall.
American taxpayers ended up footing the bill after Mexican leaders flatly rejected the idea.
“NO,” Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico’s president, tweeted in May 2018. “Mexico will NEVER pay for a wall. Not now, not ever. Sincerely, Mexico (all of us).”
___
Associated Press writer Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
Virginia Tech Soccer Player Benched For Refusing to Follow Coach’s Woke Orders Reaches $ Six Figure Settlement.
A former Virginia Tech soccer player who accused her coach of benching her for expressing political views at a game will receive $100,000 from a settlement of her lawsuit.
The money will go to Kiersten Hening as part of an agreement to dismiss a federal lawsuit in which she claimed she was punished for exercising her First Amendment rights, according to her attorney, Cameron Norris of Arlington.
Norris said the terms of the settlement included no admission of wrongdoing by either his client or Charles “Chugger” Adair, head coach of the women’s soccer team.
Adam Mortara, an attorney representing Hening, demolished Chugger’s alternate reality tweeting, “If by clarity you mean you are paying my client six figures in a settlement then you’re right that’s pretty clear. Honestly, Coach, read the Court’s opinion. You are paying. Defendants don’t pay in cases that have no standing.”
A pipeline near St. Ignace, Michigan. (Dale G. Young/Detroit News via AP)
Views: 29
Another Biden lie revealed. Biden Lost Out on Jobs, Billions of Dollars in Revoking Pipeline. Remember how we were told that the Pipeline wouldn’t produce any significant jobs or more oil? Well Biden’s DOE told a different story.
Biden’s actions on the permits effectively brought the expansive project to a halt. The report from late December estimates that a working pipeline would have been worth plenty: some $9.6 billion in economic benefits, along with nearly 60,000 jobs.
“The Biden administration finally owned up to what we have known all along — killing the Keystone XL Pipeline cost good-paying jobs, hurt Montana’s economy and was the first step in the Biden administration’s war on oil and gas production in the United States,” said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., in a Thursday statement. He lamented what he described as a a squandering of rich economic opportunity and a staggering loss for working families.
“Unfortunately, the administration continues to pursue energy production anywhere but the United States. These policies may appeal to the woke left but hurt Montana’s working families,” he said. “I’ll keep fighting back against Biden’s anti-energy agenda and supporting Montana energy projects and jobs.”
According to reports, TC Energy signed an agreement with four labor unions in August 2020, and subsequently pledged to create 42,000 American jobs — with total wages approaching $2 billion.
"Keystone XL project would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4-9.6 billion..." https://t.co/AgtyvqMl1K#FoxNews
Rogue cop guns down unarmed female and the AG ignore that. So the AG wishes to honor five cops who died of natural causes or suicide, but ignores the fact that a police officer panicked and killed an unarmed woman in cold blood. This from Breitbart.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland honored the five Capitol Police officers on Thursday who, he said, died after defending the legislature from the January 6 riot in 2021 — though none were killed during the violence.
In a statement on the second anniversary of the Capitol riot, Garland appeared to link the riot to the deaths:
For those who haven’t been following, a compilation of one-paragraph summaries of all the Twitter Files threads by every reporter. With links and notes on key revelations
It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.
Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.
Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”
THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER
A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.
Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.
Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 – January 6th, 2021
First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.
This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.
Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.
As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.
Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”
Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.
Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”
The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.
Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”
The ten teleporter documents referred to in Mike Shellenberger’s FBI thread.
HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN
Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.
Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.
Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:
The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.
Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”
David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”
Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.
and
Twitter Files Parts 11and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023
HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN
and
TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”
These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”
The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.
GLOSSARY OF “TWITTER FILES” TERMS
Government Agencies and NGOs
CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces
ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence
FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI
“OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA
GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department
USIC: United States intelligence community
HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts
EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter
DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council
IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin
Twitter or Industry-specific terms
PII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information” is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we interstitial that?”
JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which complaints rise and are decided
PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user, to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”
SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with the most high-profile, controversial rulings
SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content that have been reported for moderation review
CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity
SRT: Strategic Response Team
GET: Global Escalation Team
VF: Visibility Filtering
GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a chronological record of all actions taken on an account
VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.
GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence
BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically
BME: Bulk Media Exploitation
EP Abuse: Episodic abuse
PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process, under a limited exception
FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated. “Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts
IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.
I want to thank fellow writer Matt Taibbi for this great article.
Twitter tried to balk at cooperating with government agencies deemed “political.” In the end, it allowed everyone access through the FBI “Belly Button”
In the first week of May, 2020, at the peak of Covid-19 panic, Twitter senior legal executive Stacia Cardille received a communication from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the would-be operational/analytical arm of the U.S. State Department. Founded in the Obama years under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the GEC was like the State Department’s wannabe version of the NSA or the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Appended to an attachment with a long list of names was a note from the GEC — remember, these were the Trump years — that read, in part:
We are providing these 5,500 accounts that display inorganic behavior and follow two or more of the 36 Chinese diplomatic twitter accounts that we have identified in the report. Due to the fact that these accounts follow two or more of these diplomatic accounts, and a good portion of them are newly created, we believe that they are suspicious.
Let’s stop right there. You do not need to have a legal background to see that something doesn’t look right. Why would a Federal agency send a public company this type of information? Why would you not do your own investigation to see if any laws are being broken?
Twitter should have brought in legal experts to see if this was true. And if it was, why wouldn’t the federal agency turn this over to the DOJ?
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