• #MAGA,  Donald Trump,  Parler,  Twitter

    Twitter Loses $5 Billion After Trump Banning

    This is the market so far today.

    Twitter stock fell as much as 12% on Monday after the social-media company permanently banned President Trump’s account on Friday evening. The share-price decline wiped nearly $5 billion from Twitter’s market capitalization.
    Twitter’s bosses suspended Trump’s account – which had about 88 million followers – after the world leader’s fanning of conspiracies about voter fraud and election theft spurred thousands of his supporters to lay siege to the Capitol last week.
    “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said.

    Parler is also off-line since Amazon Web Services deplatformed them at midnight last night. The said they would be back by noon with a different hosting company.

    I guess we will see.

  • Babe Didrikson Zaharias,  Donald Trump

    President Trump Awards My Great Aunt Babe Didrikson Zaharias The Presidential Medal of Freedom

    Thank you, President Trump!

    Babe Zaharias, considered by many to be the greatest female athlete of all-time, is one of three recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Donald Trump.

    A representative from the Zaharias Foundation received the award on the late athlete’s behalf in a private event Thursday at the White House.

    Zaharias was born in Port Arthur in 1911 and was known for her talents in a variety of sports, including golf. She won ten LPGA major championships, two Olympic gold medals, an Olympic silver medal in track and field, and was an All-American basketball player. She also played baseball and was an expert diver, roller-skater and bowler, according to a biography on the foundation’s website. She was eventually named the Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th century by ESPN, Sports Illustrated and The Associated Press.

    Zaharias was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1953 and became one of the first public figures to openly discuss her illness in an attempt to spread awareness about the disease, the foundation said. She died in 1956 at the age of 44 at John Sealy Hospital in Galveston.

    KBMT in Beaumont reports Zaharias Foundation president W.L. Pate had campaigned for nearly two years for Zaharias to be given the award posthumously.

    Babe Didrikson Zaharias is my Great Aunt = my grandmother’s (Dora) sister.

    When the pandemic is over, I look forward to a trip to Beaumont, Texas and help with the restoration of Babe’s Memorial Golf Tournament.

  • #MAGA,  Donald Trump,  Parler,  Twitter

    The Friday Night Social Media Massacre

    The social media massacre on Twitter and Parler was REAL last night.

    Tech companies on Friday night made significant moves against conservative presences on their respective servers , with Twitter purging major high-profile conservative accounts including President Donald Trump, who received a permanent ban..

    Apple, meanwhile, threatened to blacklist Parler in its app store over the company’s content moderation policies, while Google outright banned the app from its own software-sharing system.

    Twitter on Friday officially banned Trump from its platform, citing his two recent tweets stating his intent to skip Joe Biden’s inauguration and offering praise to his his millions of supporters , which the company said constituted violations of its “glorification of violence” policy.

    “[O]ur determination,” the company wrote, “is that the two Tweets … are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.”

    Twitter on Friday also banned the accounts of Trump attorney Sidney Powell and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, arguing that the two had spread false information related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and had thus violated the company’s content rules.

    The alternative social media app Parler, meanwhile — which has billed itself as a free-speech alternative to Twitter’s content moderation policies and which has attracted a growing number of conservative users in recent months — faced major pressure from tech giants Apple and Google to rewrite its content rules.

    Apple informed Parler that it would ban it from its App Store software sharing system if Parler did not reform its moderation policies to more stringently police reportedly violent speech.

    Google, meanwhile, booted Parler from its own app store, citing the app’s failure to engage in “robust moderation for egregious content.”

    “In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues,” Google said.

    People on the RIGHT are scrambling to protect their friend/engagement lists and migrating to more reliable platforms. I suspect that Parler may be taken down and a reversion to websites, blogs, email lists and good old fashion USPS mail will be the short-term result.

    Anti-trust action against Google and Apple will quickly occur as will lawsuits from red state attorney generals.

    As for President Trump, he will (after January 20) either purchase a television enterprise (my bet is Newsmax) or develop his own. He may develop a social media platform or use more traditional media to attack Section 230 and bring the whole business down a bit.

    The latest antics in the increasingly complex soap opera over the fate of Section 230. Last month, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss potential legislation that would limit protections for social media companies under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which provides a shield to online publishers from liability for content generated by users. Several proposals have already been introduced.

    Republicans railed against the companies and their CEOs, who appeared virtually, because of their perceptions the Silicon Valley powerhouses are biased against conservative views and work to censor conservatives, like President Donald Trump, while giving liberal politicians a pass.

    “We have to find a way when Twitter and Facebook make a decision about what’s reliable and what’s not , what to keep up and what to keep down, that there is transparency in the system,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee. “Section 230 has to be changed because we can’t get there from here without change.”

  • #MAGA,  Donald Trump

    Twitter Has Permanently Suspended President Trump From Twitter – Updated

    They are coming for #MAGA folks. There is little doubt that Big Tech is canceling Trump and Trump supporters.

    Parler is now down.

    A liberal censorship group that hunts down conservatives wants Apple and Google to remove Parler from their stores.

    The group Sleeping Giants is similar to Media Matters. It started in 2016 when it demanded companies remove advertisements from Breitbart, but quickly slithered its way around to eliminate other conservative voices.

    They don’t call out hypocrisy or double standards. They want to *litrally* censor and shut down conservatives.

    Conservatives have fled Twitter for Parler. Therefore, Sleeping Giants is now targeting Parler.

     

    Flap is here.

    Update:

     

  • Donald Trump

    The Seventeen Debate Questions for Joe Biden

    The Trump Campaign has released seventeen questions that should be answered by Joe Biden at tonight’s debate.

    1. Your son Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from a Russian billionaire who was married to the former mayor of Moscow. He also had a joint bank account with a Chinese national that financed $100,000 in credit card purchases around the world. This all happened while you were Vice President. Why would people connected to the Russian and Chinese governments want to give your son millions of dollars?

    2. You recently said you “got started” at Delaware State University, an HBCU. The school says they have no record of you ever attending. What did you major in there?

    3. In June you said you were vetting your own potential Supreme Court picks and promised you would release your own list. Now you say you won’t release a list. Why go back on your pledge?

    4. Your running mate Kamala Harris said last year that she was open to adding as many as 4 seats to the Supreme Court. Now more leading Democrats are saying your party should pack the Supreme Court if they get the chance. Are you refusing to answer whether you will go along with this radical plan because you are too weak to stand up to it?

    5. In January 2017, you said that Democrats should not block President Trump’s nominees for the Supreme Court. You said you believe the Constitution “requires” the Senate “to give the nominee a hearing and a vote.” In 2016 you said “would go forward with the confirmation process” of a Supreme Court nominee “even a few months before a presidential election … just as the Constitution requires.” Now you say the Constitution requires the exact opposite. How do you reconcile that change?

    6. In 2008 you promised Americans that if they made less than $250

      Kauf von Erythromycin

      ,000 they would not pay a penny more in taxes. You broke that promise and imposed new taxes that directly impacted middle-class Americans. Now you’re claiming you won’t raise taxes on anyone making more than 400,000. Why should voters believe you now, especially since you’ve said you will reinstate the individual mandate tax?

    7. As Vice President, you oversaw the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. What would you do differently if you were elected?

    8. Your plan would raise the U.S. business tax rate higher than China’s rate. Won’t that make it more expensive for companies to do business in America and ultimately send jobs overseas?

    9. President Trump imposed restrictions on travel from China on January 31 to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Why did it take you two months to say you supported that decision?

    10. In 2008 you and Barack Obama promised to fully fund the federal COPS program, which provides resources to local law enforcement. But funding for this program was cut while you were vice president, despite your promise. Why did you fail to keep your word?

    11. Earlier this year your campaign staff donated money to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, an organization that bailed out of a jail a rioter who shot at police officers and other violent criminals and sexual predators. Your running mate Kamala Harris also urged people to donate to that organization and is still raising money for it. Do you condone that?

    12. You say if you’re elected you’ll push to give citizenship to the 11 million undocumented people in our country. Why do you believe they should receive Medicare and Social Security benefits?

    13. When you were running for president in 2007, both you and Obama pledged to renegotiate NAFTA, a promise you did not keep when you were in office. You recently blamed Republicans for this, saying they wouldn’t go along with it, but Democrats controlled Congress in 2009 when the Obama Administration announced it would not even try to change NAFTA. So why did you fail to keep your word?

    14. When you voted to give China “most favored nation” trade status in 2000, you said you did not foresee “the collapse of the American manufacturing economy” because of it. But by one estimate, it led to the loss of 1 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Do you acknowledge that your vote to give China most favored nation trade status was a mistake that hurt American workers?

    15. The 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic infected 60 million Americans when you were VP, and the federal government depleted its strategic stockpile of N95 masks in response. A fact check by USA Today found that your administration made no effort to replenish the stockpile of masks, despite warnings from experts. Do you accept responsibility for that failure, which left America unprepared for another pandemic?

    16. Your campaign says it is a “lie” that “the Biden-Harris ticket is the most radically pro-abortion” ticket “in U.S. history.” Are there any restrictions on abortion that you support, and if so, please be specific?

    17. You said the N-word 13 times during a 1985 Senate nomination fight, when you were quoting something attributed to someone else. Do you think that was appropriate to do? Is that the only time you’ve said the N-word?

    How about it Joe?
  • Donald Trump,  Nancy Pelosi

    Classless Speaker Nancy Pelosi Rips President Trump’s State of the Union Speech

    Pretty classless 🙄

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood up immediately following President Trump’s State of the Union address and ripped up the pages of his speech on camera as the president began to exit the podium.

    The move followed an awkward exchange at the start of the night where Mrs. Pelosi extended her hand for a handshake

    , but the president snubbed her.

    Both jabs caught the attention of social media users, where the exchanges began trending on Twitter.

    Mrs. Pelosi said she ripped the speech because it was the “courteous” thing to do. The White House official Twitter account jumped on the speaker’s move, using it as an opportunity to showcase the guests Mr. Trump had accompany him to the address. “Speaker Pelosi just ripped up: One of our last surviving Tuskegee Airmen. The survival of a child born at 21 weeks.The mourning families of Rocky Jones and Kayla Mueller. A service member’s reunion with his family. That’s her legacy,” the White House tweeted.

    When the Dems lose the House majority this November

    , they can thank the Speaker.