Random News and Notes 22 November
A federal court in Texas put a hold on that state’s redistricting plans. Two of the three judges said the redrawn maps were an impermissible racial Gerrymander. Texas, as expected, appealed to SCOTUS. The Supremes, well, Alito anyway, put the lower court ruling on hold.
. . .further order of the undersigned or of the Court.”
The whole lower court ruling was a rushed mess that ignored local court rules and decades of precedent in how cases are supposed to move through the court. It was so bad that the dissent – which is usually published contemporaneously with the majority decision – came two days later. Now, this is an administrative stay, and not a ruling on merits, but seeing as the filing deadline for Congressional campaigns in Texas is the first week of December, I expect the map to stay the way the Texas legislature drew it.
I will admit to having a bias when it comes to the subject of our next item. They – and the shithole they come from – could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn’t feel one iota of sympathy. President Trump has announced the end of Temporary Protected Status for Somalis. TPS clears a bunch of immigration hurdles and allows Somalis to stay here in the US without typical legal status.
He is mad at them for different reasons than I am. I dealt with Somalis and Somalia back in 1992-3. I was part of an operation called Gothic Serpent and had left for Germany about a week before it all went pear-shaped. Trump is mad because they stole – there is no other word for it – hundreds of millions of dollars in welfare funding and sent it to fund both sides in the war that caused the TPS status in the first place. 32 odd years later and I’d still like to see the entire country turned into uranium glass. . .
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced her retirement from Congress.
Chatter is that she got pissy after being told she couldn’t win a state-wide office by Trump and senior party officials and decided to take her ball and go home. Is it true? Very likely given the timing. What we do know for sure is that Trump very loudly and very publicly turned on her. A primary was likely, and without Trumps support she would have lost.
Oh, and something else we know for fact. She fully vests in her Congressional pension on 3 January. So much for principle. . .
We’re going to get into the weeds about X/Twitter a bit here. You know I use a lot of tweets in RNN posts. I have a carefully curated selection of sources. Or at least I thought I did. A glitch on Xitter exposed the location data for the vast majority of accounts. The glitch only lasted a couple of hours, but the damage was done. Tens of thousands of accounts were exposed for being inauthentic. MAGA accounts claiming to be US based actually being in Bangladesh or India or Serbia. Accounts claiming to be from whatever country not actually having anything to do with that location. A lot of accounts – and entire bot farms – were outed.
Why is this a problem? It appears that something like 70% of the Twitter traffic on a lot of key US topics is driven by non-US accounts. I saw a note about the traffic behind Tucker and Candace Owens this morning. The vast majority of the posters re-upping, pushing and commenting on their stuff is foreign. Like 80%.
Full disclosure: this editor has three Twitter accounts, @kitdafbs – my go-to screen name/handle on socmed, @milvetsandpatr2 – the account for the site, shared with Rogue, and a throwaway that I haven’t actually used. They are all US based.
