Donald J. Trump tweets on this beautiful morning are a scattered assortment (hot mess) at 8:30 am:
Can't believe I finally got a good story in the @washingtonpost. It discusses the enthusiasm of "Trump" voters through campaign....
2 hours ago
...contributions. The RNC is taking in far more $'s than the Dems, and much of it by my wonderful small donors. I am working hard for
1 hr
Late Night host are dealing with the Democrats for their very "unfunny" & repetitive material, always anti-Trump! Should we get Equal Time?
24 minutes ago
More and more people are suggesting that Republicans (and me) should be given Equal Time on T.V. when you look at the one-sided coverage?
18 minutes ago
I called Chuck Schumer yesterday to see if the Dems want to do a great HealthCare Bill. ObamaCare is badly broken, big premiums. Who knows!
1 minute ago
(This one was added by me at 9:52 I guess he just got out of the can and had one more thought)
@NBCNews is so knowingly inaccurate with their reporting. The good news is that the PEOPLE get it, which is really all that matters! Not #1
27 mins ago
You might ask are these his tweets or those of his former caddy (his ghost Tweeter). Well, most people agree: If it's text-only and sent between 6 pm and 10 am, Donald Trump probably did the tweet.
My favorite: Baiting Republicans with the Schumer tweet.
What we need is a third party: One for the moderate democrats and the moderate republicans. Let's call it the Moderates. We need this party quickly before the country is decimated.
Today, the narrative pushed by GOP operatives is that top Republican donors are frustrated with Congressional leadership and withholding donations because the Republican Congress is face-planting and can't get anything done.
It's a fake narrative. FAKE NEWS.
In fact, the GOP donor class is over the moon with Trump. It can say one thing and do another with ease, as a result of Citizens United, the US Supreme Court decision that turned the campaign finance in the US into a corporate piñata.
"The establishment wing of the Republican Party is reportedly being hit by a surging revolt from their donors — from whom the establishment gets its financial lifeblood — amid the failure of GOP leadership to get its agenda through Congress. According to Politico, mega-donor Thomas Wachtell urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to “just do something” at a recent L.A. dinner. McConnell reportedly responded by noting that passing legislation takes time, but such a plea was not greeted favorably by attendees."
Breitbart quoting Politico: neat. What is the evidence that the GOP donor class is over the moon with Trump?
Consider: Trump's Department of Interior Chief Ryan Zinke (yes, the one taking private jet trips at taxpayers' expense) hired as deputy assistant secretary, Todd Willens, who during the W. administration managed under cover of darkness to have Everglades National Park removed from the list of endangered world heritage sites.
An Interior Department official who removed the Everglades from the United Nations’ endangered-sites list during the Bush administration is back.
The Interior Department announced last week that Todd Willens, a longtime Washington-based lobbyist and congressional staffer, will take an assistant deputy secretary job under Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
In 2007, Willens urged the United Nations World Heritage Committee to remove Everglades National Park from the list of endangered natural and cultural sites over the objections of the committee’s scientific advisory group.(Official who nixed Everglades from UN endangered-site list gets Trump job), July 11, 2017 Miami Herald
By all accounts, long-serving DOI staffers are profoundly demoralized; music to polluters' ears. Zinke is one of the nation's top environmental officials charged by Trump to reverse policies acknowledging the reality of and responding to threats from climate change.
Then, there is EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who has turned the federal regulatory agency into a sophisticated workshop for regulatory dismantling.
Who would benefit from a decision like Willen's, Zinke and Pruitt: Big Sugar in Florida, that's who. What we know from Big Sugar's donation program is that oligarchs control Florida's GOP establishment by nesting third party political action committees like Russia dolls. By the time these committees fill with millions of dollars, aimed to support GOP candidates from Marco Rubio to Rick Scott and others -- from favored state legislators to county commissioners -- the trail leading back to the donors has either disappeared or been smudged beyond recognition.
Big Sugar oligarch Pepe Fanjul embraces FL Senator Marco Rubio following the kickoff of Rubio's GOP presidential nomination campaign. Trump derided Rubio and FL GOP voters agreed. Rubio carried scarcely a quarter of the primary vote in 2016.
Zinke this morning is in South Florida where protesters will greet his arrival. The battle to protect the Everglades continues on another front: fracking. Both the oil industry and Big Sugar share the aim to de-legitimize the protections afforded national parks and to put public lands to more "useful" purposes like generating corporate profits from polluting activities.
That's why the disinformation campaign can work: have one group of puppeteers say that GOP donors are withholding money, scaring the bejesus out of any Republican who might moderate the party's relationship with Trump -- the most chaotic president in US history -- and his anti-environmental objectives while plowing massive dollars into deep and dark political action committees to guarantee that so long as Trump is president, the sun is shining.
US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it succinctly:
Dark money destroyed the integrity of our public debate. Secret front groups pollute the political discourse. Each year our planet sets new heat records, but Republicans refuse to acknowledge reality and continue to give billions in handouts to the fossil fuel industry. It’s a national disgrace.
Honestly, could Republican oligarchs from the polluter class have it any better than right now?
Eye On Miami has been riveted by the evidence Russia targeted and influenced the 2016 US election of Donald Trump. Sifting through data trails is difficult work, requiring forensic software experts, but a few facts emerge (not FAKE).
1) Russia was FAR AHEAD of the US in exploiting "open" social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. These massive, transnational corporations have a single purpose: to make as much money for shareholders as possible. Meanwhile, Congress -- and Republicans though not exclusively Republicans -- are to blame for failing to safeguard democracy, starting with elections and continuing to the present moment: protecting the most incompetent, chaotic and dangerous president in US history.
2) Yes, the Obama administration knew that Russians were meddling and even warned the public and media prior to the elections, but most Americans believed the Russia incursion was a brush fire. In fact, it was a five alarm fire and Obama -- sensitized by the right-wing fury against Hillary Clinton (her emails) -- was overly cautious. In hindsight -- with the experience of a chaotic first year of the Trump WH -- that's the understatement of the century.
3) There is enough disturbing information in the public domain, pointing to the collusion of Trump campaign operatives, family members, and even Trump himself with Putin insiders/ Russian mobsters/ govt officials that is so damaging to the presidency, Trump has literally lost the mandate to serve. Who doubts that if a Democrat were president, any Democrat, the GOP Congress would already have moved to impeach.
4) Putin's goal from the start has been to weaken the prestige of the United States and to weaken Western democracies. Period. Full stop. In this, he has massively succeeded through a kind of asymmetrical warfare -- using hackers, bots, and off-the-shelf software. Putin keeps winning, because Congress is literally paralyzed by the Trump WH.
5) Recall that it was Republicans in Congress who objected to Obama administration efforts to PROTECT the right to vote in free, fair elections across the nation. It is incumbent on every American voter to understand we are on the precipice: Trump is truly a terrible president, but if there are no consequences, there will be no barriers to protect taxpayers and citizens from the next charade to come to elected office.
Facebook has said ads bought by Russian operatives reached 10 million of its users.
But does that include everyone reached by the information operation? Couldn’t the Russians also have created simple — and free — Facebook posts and hoped they went viral? And if so, how many times were these messages seen by Facebook’s massive user base?
The answers to those questions, which social media analyst Jonathan Albright studied for a research document he posted online Thursday, are: No. Yes. And hundreds of millions — perhaps many billions — of times.
“The primary push to influence wasn’t necessarily through paid advertising,” said Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The best way to to understand this from a strategic perspective is organic reach.”
In other words, to understand Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election, the frame should not be the reach of the 3,000 ads that Facebook handed over to Congress and that were bought by a single Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency. Instead, the frame should be the reach of all the activity of the Russian-controlled accounts — each post, each “like,” each comment and also all of the ads. Looked at this way, the picture shifts dramatically. It is bigger — much bigger — but also somewhat different and more subtle than generally portrayed.
Both Facebook and Twitter say Kremlin-linked organizations used their platforms to try and influence voters during the 2016 election. Here's how. (The Washington Post)
Albright, who also is a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, has been studying fake news and Russian propaganda for months. And over the past week, as the names of some of the 470 Russian-bought pages and accounts have trickled out in news reports, he has been using a Facebook-owned analytics tool, called CrowdTangle, to measure the Russian campaign and also has downloaded the most recent 500 posts for each of them.
For six of the sites that have been made public — Blacktivists, United Muslims of America, Being Patriotic, Heart of Texas, Secured Borders and LGBT United — Albright found that the content had been “shared” 340 million times. That’s from a tiny sliver of the 470 accounts that have been made public. Even if those sites were unusually effective compared to the 464 others, Albright’s findings still suggest a total reach well into the billions of “shares” on Facebook.
The terminology is important here. For the purposes of these metrics, a “share” is essentially how often a post may have made its way into somebody’s Facebook “news feed” — without determining whether any of these users actually read the post. Another metric, called “interactions,” counts something narrower but more important -- the number of times individual users acted on what they had read by sharing a post with their Facebook “friends,” hitting the "like" button, making a comment or posting an emoji symbol.
That measurement for those six accounts, Albright's research showed, was 19.1 million. That means that more people had direct “interactions” with regular posts from just six accounts than saw the ads from all 470 pages and accounts that Facebook has identified as controlled by the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency.
Facebook had no immediate comment on Albright’s research. The company has shut down all 470 pages and accounts it has identified as controlled by the Internet Research Agency.
In a blog post on Monday, Elliot Schrage, vice president of policy and communications, wrote, "We’re still looking for abuse and bad actors on our platform — our internal investigation continues. We hope that by cooperating with Congress, the Special Counsel and our industry partners, we will help keep bad actors off our platform."
The other revelation in Albright’s download, including thousands of posts he has put online in an interactive graphic, is that most of them have nothing to do with the Nov. 8 election. Instead they are tailored to fit seamlessly into the ordinary online conversation of their particular audiences — politically activated African Americans, gay women, Muslims and people concerned about illegal immigration, Texan heritage or the treatment of veterans. There is talk of political issues, but relatively little about voting for Republican Donald Trump or against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
That suggests that the Facebook part of the Russian disinformation campaign consisted of at least two steps: The first was to identify voters and sort them into buckets based on the issues they responded to. This was done through the organic posts. The second step was to target voters in these buckets with Russian- bought political ads shaped to their interests, with the intention -- in at least some cases -- of affecting voting behavior.
“They were working to lead people along and develop a sense of trust,” Albright said.
The tone of the posts varies strikingly by the page. The one seemingly managed by a lesbian is intimate, confidential and chatty, with complaints about parents and teachers not understanding the challenges of being young and gay. The English is nearly flawless. One popular post said simply, "Bi and proud!" with a thumbs-up emoji attached to the end.
The United Muslim posts take pride in their religion, demand respect and seek to distance their faith from terrorism and ISIS. "Share if you believe Muslims have nothing to do with 9/11. Let's see how many people know the truth!," said one that reached 35,275 news feeds.
The Blacktivist posts are assertive and often angry, with many references to police violence against African Americans. Several urge the sharing of a video. One that reached 68,000 news feeds said, "There is a war going against black kids."
The other pages are conservative and anti-immigrant, with particular complaints about the treatment of U.S. veterans.
One on "Being Patriotic," said, "At least 50,000 homeless veterans are starving dying in the streets, but liberals want to invite 620,000 refugees and settle them among us. We have to take care of our own citizens, and it must be the primary goal for our politicians!" That post reached the news feeds of 724,323 Facebook users.
The most explicitly political of the posts may be from Secured Borders, which routinely refers to Clinton as “Killary” instead of Hillary. Many of the posts Abright collected went viral, reaching tens or hundreds of thousands of Facebook news feeds, often by posing a question or calling for a response — tools known to people savvy in the use of social media.
“Issues that divide and outrage tend to spread the most, which is a common theme in social networks,” he said.
One final insight from Albright’s research: To the extent there is a discernible political motive in them, the goal seemed less to inspire enthusiasm for one candidate than to dampen support for voting at all. This fits with what many other researchers and investigators have said about the Russian disinformation campaign, that it drove directly at the fractures in American society and sought to widen them.
“A lot of these posts had the intent to get people not to vote,” Albright said. “This is a concerted effort of manipulation. Based on the engagement and reach and the outcome of the election .. I’d say it’s been fairly successful, sadly."
Only Commissioner Moss voted against this Ordinance, I think he would like to be Mayor of a new City because he is term limited.
Didn't we have a referendum on Incorporation? I seem to remember a referendum that passed to make it easier to incorporate and then Barbara Jordan immediately put a roadblock on it. Then they had a study, and bla bla...wasted time...and now another roadblock. Anyone remember what is going on? Daniella Levine Cava, constituents from Commissioner Moss's district are disappointed you voted for this.
Here is what passed on the ballot in 2012, it was meant to make forming cities easier not harder:
-------
In other startling Miami Dade County News: They want to put a $2 Billion sewage treatment plant on this piece of property, West of NW 137th Avenue and North of NW 6th Street (Near 836 and our well field and West of The Urban Develop Boundary). The property owners are fighting eminent domain by the County for the facility on the grounds it would be incompatible with planned subdivisions.
George Cavros has been active in state and local energy issues for over a
decade. He is also an adjunct professor of Energy Law.
FPL Pollutes and Loots at Turkey Point
September 29th, 2017
Clean Energy, Energy Policy, High Risk Energy, Nuclear › George Cavros, Southern Alliance For Clean Energy
You make a mess, you clean it up.
That’s a basic lesson that’s taught to us by our parents at an early age. Yet, executives at Florida Power & Light (FPL), the state’s biggest power company, have apparently forgotten that lesson over time. It wants its customers to pay more than $200 million over the next ten years for cleaning up a mess – created on its watch – at its Turkey Point plant in south Florida.
Polluting
The company operates a ten square mile cooling canal system for its aging Turkey Point plant 3 & 4 reactors. FPL is the only utility in the country to use this system for cooling water for power generation. The miles of canals are unlined, and due to the porous geology of south Florida, water from canals has leached underground to form a plume of hyper-saline and contaminated water spreading westward in the Biscayne Aquifer towards drinking water wells and eastward into Biscayne National Park. The Biscayne Aquifer is the sole drinking water source for Miami-Dade County and the Keys.
Last year, FPL entered into a “consent order” with the FL Dept. of Environmental Protection for a plan to clean up it’s mess. An expert say that this plan won’t even solve the problem (more on that later). Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) filed a Clean Water Act lawsuit last year asking a federal judge to find that FPL violated its environmental discharge permit and require a remedy that stops the source of the pollution. A hearing is scheduled for next year.
Looting
There’s more. FPL has filed a request with the Florida Public Service Commission to recover more than $100 million from its customers next year for alleged clean-up expenses and investments that it has already racked up. It will seek to ultimately recover over $200 million dollars from families and businesses in its territory. Yes, it wants its customer to pay. Let that sink in for a moment. This request is especially shameless given that FPL earned record profits last year – taking home $1.7 Billion.
A Commission hearing in the Environmental Cost Recovery Docket is scheduled for October 25th in Tallahassee to determine whether these costs were “prudently” incurred. If not, FPL will have to cover the costs to clean up its own mess.
A history of negligence at Turkey Point
Expert testimony, filed in the docket by the Office of Public Counsel, establishes a historical trail of FPL negligence and concludes that the Company’s clean-up plan – the one for which it wants customers to pay – won’t achieve its goal. FPL knew, or should have known, about the spreading pollution since 1978 – but failed to act on it for decades. Is FPL’s inaction in the face of a spreading pollution prudent? The expert specifically found:
- There are data & studies from 1978 that showed impacts to groundwater from the cooling canals;
- FPL should have known by 1978, but certainly by 1992, that it had a growing problem on its hands;
- FPL appears to claim that 2013 is the first time it discovered the plume was expanding;
- FPL and its consultants either ignored or turned a blind eye to data showing a growing problem.
The evidence of FPL’s failure to address the pollution mess over decades at Turkey Point is compelling, but FPL has oversized influence in Tallahassee and disputes the claims. That’s why Florida Public Service Commission needs to hear from FPL customers. Expect the legal fireworks to fly at the October 25th Commission hearing. SACE, along with other consumer parties, will be opposing FPL’s attempt to loot customers.
After all, families and businesses served by FPL shouldn’t have to pay for the Company’s negligence. FPL should clean up its own mess.
The more I read about the "free" flow of social media platforms as unpaid political advertisements, incorporating steady messaging meant to trigger the WORST of human nature, the more angry I am at elected officials who have literally been asleep at the wheel as democracy -- not to mention individual rights -- was hijacked by corporations that only existed in the imagination of a few entrepreneurs a decade ago.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media platforms have created their own ecosystems that wrap us up in a cash money embrace, exclusive of any moral responsibility to fairness and balance in the public square: the world wide web.
Provably, they have invented business models based on your browsing history to target political advertisements with DISASTROUS results. These have mainly accrued to the benefit of a few oligarchs who are, themselves, as transnational as their social media empires. Facebook, Twitter, and Google stand at the top.
You SHOULD be furious.
Congressional committees are "investigating" the role of social media in the 2016 election. Thanks to solid reporting (UK Guardian leads the way), the outlines of the impact on democracy are coming clear. Whether voters and taxpayers are educated enough to navigate the complexity of digital interference in our constitutional rights is very much up in the air.
Don't be distracted by an inconsequential president who cries FAKE NEWS at the drop of a penny. To Trump, FAKE NEWS is anything he disagrees with, subject to change at any time. What Trump represents is an urge to MANIPULATE media to serve any cause that strikes his imagination, at any time.
Donald Trump wants to be a social media platform, a cyborg with enough chips on his shoulder to sink the world.
It is important to recognize the scale of this threat is both vast and particular to your online identity at the same time. Congress needs to tighten the screws down on both the capturing of social media platforms -- by recognizing these are in fact PUBLIC UTILITIES -- and the right of individuals to protect their own data from being harnessed by social media platforms, for sale to the highest bidder.
This is serious business, folks, it is political and needs action now.
Data-sets feed the opaque algorithms that shape the cyber world we see and interact with. Yet that data concerns the most basic tenets of who we are.’
Tuesday 3 October 2017 10.28 EDTLast modified on Tuesday 3 October 2017 11.15 EDT
“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.” Thus, in 1996, John Perry Barlow laid out his manifesto, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he encapsulated a philosophy flowing through the heart of worldwide web. His was a vision that would come to dominate the internet today, a thread that went from Timothy Leary to Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs to our current tech giants.
Such is the dominance of this philosophy that it has spawned a new creed, “dataism”. The central principle of this dogma is the free flow of data, unrestricted and unregulated. This libertarian view of information uniquely sought to attach freedom to a concept – the flow of information – rather than to a human liberty. It provided the ideological architecture for the internet that we know today – ubiquitous and pervasive, that leaves a data trail in its wake.
While running for U.S. Congress in District 27, Jose Javier Rodriguez is also running around at home after a one year old. Looks like he will have some more running to do -- like to the hospital soon. In less than 2 months Sonia, his very lovely wife, will be due with their second child.
The Democratic crowded field for Ileana Ros Lehtinen's vacating seat -- the 27th Congressional District:
Mary Barzee Flores - Former federal judge
Kristen Rosen Gonzalez - Miami Beach commissioner
Matt Haggman - Former Knight Foundation Director
Michael Hepburn - Vice President of a nonprofit
Mark Anthony Person
David Richardson - State Rep.
Jose Javier Rodriguez - Member of Florida State Senate (SD-37)
There are approximately 712,083 people in this district. 72.7% are Hispanic but almost half are not of Cuban descent. It is increasingly a Democratic District. There are some very good candidates in this district. I could see voting for many of them although I am already committed to JJ Rodriguez.
Why doesn't one of these strong Democrats move and challenge Carlos Curbelo? He is a weak Republican in District 26:
The Cook Political Report, which publishes a Partisan Voting Index, named Ros-Lehtinen third on the list of the 10 Republicans in the most Democratic districts in the nation. Miami U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo topped the list. Looks like the Dems will lose on 26 as they don't have a strong candidate there. If they lose 27 too, they are total idiots.
In 2016, my wife and I filed the first shareholder proposal dealing specifically with sea level rise impacts to shareholders of a major electric utility. Although there have been plenty of global warming proposals from investors, ours specifically requested that NextEra, the parent company of FPL, advise shareholders of its vulnerability -- both markets and infrastructure -- to sea level rise. (Those interested, can read more by clicking this link.)
We were pleasantly surprised that in April 2017 our proposal garnered more than 20 percent of shareholders who voted; mainly very large institutional investors.
The shift in institutional investors’ support for climate-change-related shareholder proposals in 2017 may augur a paradigm shift in the shareholder-engagement process—as activists target institutional investors themselves as a tactic through which they hope to influence corporate behavior. Institutional investors may be less sensitive to the full panoply of social-investing concerns, beyond climate change and gender, but these trends deserve careful attention in the future.
What does this mean for Manhattan Institute supporters from the ranks of corporate America and climate-change denialism? Based on past experience, we can extrapolate: more opposition to and perhaps even suppression of shareholder activists like us.
Mr. Copland is a senior fellow with and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute.
Ms. O’Keefe is the Manhattan Institute’s Proxy Monitor project manager.
The Manhattan Institute’s Proxy Monitor database, launched in 2011, is the first publicly available database cataloging shareholder proposals and Dodd-Frank-mandated executive-compensation advisory votes[1] at America’s largest publicly traded companies. Findings and reports by James R. Copland, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and director of legal policy, and Margaret M. O’Keefe, Proxy Monitor project manager, draw upon information in the database to examine shareholder activism in which investors attempt to influence corporate management through the shareholder-proposal process.[2] The conclusions in these reports are the authors’ own and do not reflect an institutional view of the Manhattan Institute.
Yes I have to get my scanner to work. Thank you New York Times For this list...not that I want the Tweeter in Chief to fill any of his promises, but I guess there are people who do - Somewhere in Russia I assume. All of his promises come with a CAVEAT:
...and let's not forget North Korea because our tweeter-in-chief never does:
"Wonderful"? I suppose he realizes he has over-used "Great" but "Wonderful" isn't that a girlie adjective?
Has anyone counted the number of times he used GREAT on twitter? Apparently someone is keep track, in his first 100 days these are the words he tweeted most:
The following was grabbed from a Twitter feed and reinforces our complaints about Facebook and Google: manipulation of algorithms that drive social media traffic.
