Comment on Bits: Government and Social Networking

“A contingent of progressive Democrats and White House allies are privately urging President Joe Biden’s team to use Thursday’s debate to recast his candidacy as an attack on the billionaires and big businesses that Donald Trump has increasingly embraced,” Politico reports. “These Democrats have pleaded with Biden’s advisers to adopt a more bluntly populist message as a response to two problems: that Trump is still winning over more voters on the issue of the economy, according to polls, and that many Americans remain unaware of Biden’s record of taking on powerful mega-corporations.”

“A Biden administration push to curtail worsening border clashes between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is running into major headwinds because of the difficulty the U. S. faces in arranging a cease-fire in Gaza,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The connections between the two fronts underscore the diplomatic conundrum facing the White House as it seeks to prevent a full-scale war that could draw in Iran and broaden the fighting well beyond Gaza.”

“House Republicans on Wednesday advanced legislation that would slash funding for the Department of Justice and U. S. attorneys’ offices across the country, the latest attempt by the GOP to punish federal law enforcement agencies that they claim have been weaponized against conservatives, especially former President Donald Trump,” the New York Times reports. “The spending bill, approved along party lines by a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, would cut funding for salaries and other expenses at the Justice Department by 20 percent, and for U.

“Last year, the five self-proclaimed ‘Sister Senators’ from South Carolina were awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award after they joined together across party lines to block the legislature from passing a near-total abortion ban,” the New York Times reports. “But a prize from the nation’s most storied Democratic family may not be the best calling card in Republican primaries in the red-state South.” “All three of the Republican women in the group of five — the others were a Democrat and an independent — faced primary challenges, and all three have now lost.”

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Can a person acquire an immunity to propaganda? I’ve been wondering. It was Julia Ioffe who got me started. She wrote last week of the dwindling effectiveness of the Russian disinformation industry. She reports that the bot-farms that caused all the mischief in 2016 are now a shadow of their former selves.