(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest for Weds, Sept 27 (Turns out SOME Repubs go to libraries Edition) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-27 Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw. OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley bashed fellow contender Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday night for his stance on TikTok, sparring onstage at the second GOP debate. “This is infuriating, because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have. And … honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say,” Haley said, taking a swipe at the 38-year-old entrepreneur. Asked about his move to join the video-sharing app TikTok, despite it being banned on government-issued devices due to concerns about its parent company’s ties to the Chinese government, Ramaswamy said, “Part of how we win elections is reaching the next generation of young Americans where we are.” ...“150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get your text messages, they can get all of these things. China knows exactly what they’re doing,” Haley said during the debate. “We can’t trust you. We can’t trust you. We can’t have TikTok in our kids’ lives,” Haley hit back at Ramaswamy. x “I favor ending birthright citizenship,” said man born in the U.S. to two noncitizens, making him a birthright citizen. pic.twitter.com/mUe1WgK6j5 — Sawyer A Hackett (@SawyerHackett) September 28, 2023 x Mike Pence was Vice President of the United States and still doesn’t know how a bill becomes a law, apparently https://t.co/kA2F8YoMsP — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 28, 2023 x Chris Christie just claimed that no one has done anything about immigration in 13 years. Actually, Obama and Dems passed comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate in 2013 by a wide bipartisan margin, including 14 Republicans. The GOP House wouldn't even vote on it. — Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) September 28, 2023 (Gift Link — you can read it even without a subscription!) The Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, has brought her long-awaited, audacious case against Amazon, signaling the Biden administration’s determination to restore an approach to competition law that has been in decline since the Carter administration. This will doubtless draw fresh criticism about her supposed overreach. But Amazon is precisely the kind of company that Congress had in mind in enacting America’s many antitrust laws. Only more so: The Congress of 1890, which passed the first of those laws, could never have imagined the world we now inhabit. The robber barons of that era hijacked the economy and politics, but they also faced the constraints of empires grounded in physical goods. They couldn’t lay a railroad or erect a steel mill without time-consuming capital and logistical hurdles. Today’s tech barons at huge platforms like Amazon, Google and Meta can deploy anticompetitive, deceptive and unfair tactics with the agility and speed of a digital system. As in any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. And Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era. Having first subsidized end-users and then offered favorable terms to business customers, Amazon was able to exploit its digital flexibility to lock both in and raid them for an ever-increasing share of the value they created. This program of redistribution from platform users to shareholders continued until Amazon became a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews. ...Menendez is done. Regardless of his legal fortunes, he’s not going to be renominated next year. But what about the remainder of this term? If history is an indication, that is entirely up to his colleagues in the Senate. ...No example proves this point better than the case of Harrison “Pete” Williams, the disgraced New Jersey politician who was convicted of crimes related to the famous ABSCAM case. Ironically, Bob Menendez currently fills the same seat that Williams ultimately resigned. ...When one of Williams’ defenders, Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, recommended that the body censure, rather than expel their colleague, arguing that expulsion had traditionally been reserved for cases of treason and insurrection, his Democratic colleague, Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, answered in disgust: “If non-treasonous behavior be the sole benchmark of fitness to serve in this body, then one must ask how fit is this body in which we serve?” Eagleton emerged as one of Williams’ most vocal critics and argued that if the convicted politician wouldn’t do them the dignity of vacating his seat, “we should not perpetrate our own disgrace by asking him to stay.” x As the Trumps go around saying Mar-a-Lago is worth $1 billion, reminder that the Trump holding company that owns Mar-a-Lago filed 2020 tax returns saying it had real estate assets of $28 million and a yearly net income *loss* of $3 million. A $1 billion business, it isn’t. pic.twitter.com/d93BZS1GQ8 — Robert J. DeNault (@robertjdenault) September 27, 2023 The former White House aide’s memoir is yet another cautionary story of a good girl gone Trump ...I cannot count the number of times, during the Trump administration, that I looked at the young women surrounding him — the Hope Hickses and Alyssa Farahs and Sarah Matthewses — and wondered what in God’s name they were doing there. John F. Kelly, Mark Meadows, you could understand. They must have decided they could either steady the ship or party on down with it — and if the latter happened, hey, they had their entire careers in the rearview mirror. But when you’re a 20-something woman, what about Trump’s mangy persona or misogynist tendencies made you decide to serve at the pleasure of this president? “Enough” is most interesting when it serves as a case study to answer that question. Hutchinson didn’t come from money. She didn’t go to Harvard. She was wait-listed from her dream school, which wasn’t even an Ivy but a decent liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania. She ended up at Christopher Newport University, a fine institution in Virginia that you will be forgiven if you’ve barely heard of. She didn’t have a buffet of family-connection job offers awaiting her upon graduation. She got a little lucky with a college boyfriend whose family let her live with them rent-free in the D.C. area so she could work unpaid internships. But otherwise — this was a young American who got patriotic stars in her eyes the first time she visited Washington as a child, and who decided then that she’d do what it took to work there as soon as she graduated college. It was her bad luck that the White House administration coinciding with her job eligibility was an absolute toilet bowl. “Enough” is a profile in courage, but it’s equally a profile in panic. A profile in realizing that the toilet is never going to flush you out into an open ocean of possibility; that you just work in a toilet now. You are 24 years old, caught in the middle of something far bigger than you, and it turns out all your mentors are snakes. ...To onlookers, this is no doubt maddening. First of all, there’s a solution that all but a small faction of one party in one chamber of Congress would agree to—so how isn’t that being done? And how is it possible that such a rich country can be governed like this? The truth is, most of them aren’t—and that includes the U.S. itself before 1980. It would be quite simple to return to the previous system. x We're about to have yet another government shutdown, something which didn't exist before Carter's Attorney General made a disastrous interpretation in 1980. @ryanlcooper explains, and describes how this interpretation could be rolled back:https://t.co/aVtJmxgqII — David Dayen (@ddayen) September 27, 2023 ..In a blinkered and hyper-literalist exercise in hair-splitting so characteristic of the liberal legal establishment, Civiletti argued that “legal authority for continued operations either exists or it does not,” and so if Congress hasn’t passed a specific appropriation for an agency, it has to shut down. “Faithful execution of the laws cannot rest on mere speculation that Congress does not want the Executive branch to carry out Congress’ unambiguous mandates,” he wrote. Naturally, Civiletti later had to amend his strict reading of the statute because, well, stopping paychecks to soldiers or shutting down every airport in the country would be really bad. ...Remarkably, there is actually a bipartisan movement afoot in the Senate to end shutdowns, led by Maggie Hasan (D-NH) and James Lankford (R-OK). The idea is to amend the budget procedure such that if Congress fails to pass one, a stopgap status quo spending bill is triggered every two weeks, and Congress is forbidden from leaving Washington until a budget is passed. That would end shutdowns at a stroke. …But the fact that shutdowns are even possible, like the anachronistic debt ceiling, is evidence of a profound rot in the American political system. Passing a budget—thereby setting out the rate of taxation and various fees, the funding of government agencies and the military, and so forth—is perhaps the single most important routine task of any government. Heck, it’s half the reason for having a government in the first place. One of the main reasons they did not happen for longer than a few hours or days before the 1990s was a widely shared norm that certain basic functions of government, like the day-to-day functioning of the state, should be outside political disputes. It was only with the Gingrich revolution in 1994, which brought a bunch of irresponsible, dimwitted loudmouths into Congress, that the norm was shattered... x A message from me on the extreme Republican shutdown: pic.twitter.com/Gofyc437z6 — President Biden (@POTUS) September 26, 2023 Your weekly Doom Patrol: x The new, large sample Economist/YouGov poll has Biden up 5 points over Trump 45-40. The new, large sample CNN poll of NH has Biden up over Trump by 12 points, 52-40. In dozens of specials across US this year Dems are outperforming 2020 by 8 pts. Have a nice day. pic.twitter.com/m5SSK2jXyw — Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 27, 2023 TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — On the same day Alabama Black voters scored a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court, a federal trial opened in Florida in which lawyers say Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis violated the U.S. Constitution by deliberately dismantling a congressional district that favored Black candidates. It's one of several lawsuits around the country that are challenging Republican-drawn maps they say are gerrymandered to diminish the ability of Black voters to select a candidate of their choice. If successful, the lawsuits could help Democrats as they try to regain control of the House. The focus in Florida is a district that stretched more than 200 miles to connect Black voters in Jacksonville and in the majority Black county of Gadsden about 200 miles (322 kilometers) to the west. DeSantis vetoed maps the Legislature drew, which would have preserved a Black district, and forced the Legislature to approve one his staff drew. “The governor pushed and pushed and pushed,” said attorney Greg Baker. “He pressed his argument by sound bite bullying.” x Pretty sure he made it a felony for men in Florida to wear that much makeup. pic.twitter.com/HaRAZ376Gs — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 28, 2023 Funny thing: in practice, schools all over the state are removing everything, although it appears Charlotte County Schools are the first to actually put it in writing anywhere. Here’s another fun librarian scenario, which we especially enjoyed because Vianello so sharply points out the librarian’s wrongthink in framing the question at all: [Q:] If a student asks a teacher about a gay character in a novel being studied, and neither gender [identity or] sexual orientation is part of the standards for that course, the teacher will instruct the student to ask that question of their parents and will direct the conversation back to the standards of the course as they relate to the novel being studied. Vianello: Correct, but again, novels with gay characters are not to be included in classroom libraries — “err on the side of caution.” Sexual orientation/gender identity is prohibited in Pre-K — grade 8. For 9-12, no as well, unless supported by the state academic standards. Well sure, teachers should of course refer such questions to parents, but they won’t have to because there will be no gay characters anyway. Notice also that “err on the side of caution,” which translates to a mandate to pull any book that you even suspect has LGBTQ+ characters or themes. No Rainbows Anywhere. x The ban even applies to fictional characters identified as LGBTQ+, even if they don't engage in any activities that might be considered “sexual,” like kissing or joining a softball team.https://t.co/KZzxSzrxXN — Doktor Zoom (@DoktorZoom) September 27, 2023 x Oh my God this is incredible. pic.twitter.com/jzMRAl2z8Q — No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) September 27, 2023 An MIT student and linguistics professor spot an emerging English phrase and examine what it tells us about syntax — but questions remain. As Evile and Pesetsky show in a newly published paper, “whom of which” obeys very specific rules, whose nature contributes to a larger discussion about sentence construction. The paper, “Wh-which relatives and the existence of pied piping,” appears this month in the journal Glossa. “It seems to be brand new, and it’s very colloquial, but it’s extremely law-governed,” says Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT. When Evile and Pesetsky formally analyzed their “whom of which” examples, they found that, pertaining to its semantics, people consistently use “whom of which” the same way they use “whom.” The expression is not random gibberish. “With things like this, people are not being silly or uneducated,” Pesetsky says. x There’s a street in Hanoi Vietnam where a train passes through several times a day 🎥 susoo_closetpic.twitter.com/EOsuyqpvb6 — Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) September 27, 2023 (Note: This is NOT the right way to do high-speed rail!) What’s the view like from YOUR table tonight? Tell us all about it in the comments... 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