Interactive City Travel

Interactive City Guides that are never out of date. R.G.Richardon has authored over 305 Interactive Worldwide Interactive Travel Guides for restaurants, hotels, transportation, historical sites, sports and events. Restaurant Guide – pubs, dining, fast food, take out, ethnic Beverage Guide – spirits etc. Career Guide – job search, permanent, part-time, career.

Influencer marketing doesn’t need more metrics — it needs more trust and collaboration between brands and influencers

Influencer marketing doesn’t need more metrics — it needs more trust and collaboration between brands and influencers

Influencer marketing has become one of the most important tools in brand strategy. Companies across various industries are increasingly turning to social media personalities to promote their products and services.

However, despite its widespread use and significant impact, influencer marketing is surrounded by uncertainties, ambiguities and controversies, both for practitioners and the general public.

Questions often arise: How do brands determine the effectiveness of an influencer campaign? How do influencers ensure that the brand partnership does not affect their relationship with their audience? Who controls the creative process during an influencer campaign?

In our recent research article in the Journal of Marketing, we discussed these ambiguities, focusing on two core areas relevant to both influencers and brands: How to determine the value of sponsored content and how to co-produce it.

Our study drew insights from a wide range of sources, including interviews with both influencers and influencer intermediaries, podcasts, media articles and third-party platform reviews. We conducted 21 primary interviews and transcribed 37 secondary interviews from podcasts. This sample included influencers specialized in the fields of fashion, food, cosmetics, travel, lifestyle, health and sexuality.

An Open Letter to Elon Musk

by Stephen Engelberg

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Series: A Closer Look:Examining the News

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Elon,

I know your relationship with ProPublica got off to a rocky start when we contacted you about a story we were writing about your federal taxes. You replied with a lone punctuation mark — “?” — and subsequently called the story that mentioned you “a bunch of misleading stuff.”

We can agree to disagree on that story and a lot of other things. But we thought it might be useful to reach out again in light of your role, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Simply put: If you’re trying to identify wasteful practices and spending by federal agencies, you’ll find a wealth of actionable issues that our reporting has surfaced over the past 16 years. You and Vivek noted in your recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on your plans for DOGE that “the federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken.”

Our reporting over the years provides some powerful illustrations of that point. ProPublica’s work on the Navy’s cost overruns and design flaws in its ships is second to none. We recently disclosed how Microsoft boxed its competitors out of providing cybersecurity software to the biggest government agencies, including the Pentagon. (Microsoft defended its conduct, saying in a statement that its “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”)

Perhaps the most immediate relevance of our journalism to your work arises from your reported interest in creating a phone app that most Americans could use to file their taxes.

No national news organization has been more focused on this subject than ProPublica. We have thoroughly documented why the United States is one of the only industrialized countries in the world that does not provide free filing to its citizens: Companies like Intuit that make billions of dollars selling tax preparation software have persuaded Congress to block free filing and keep their businesses alive.

I’d encourage you to take a look at the story “Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free.”

You’re a busy person, so I’ll provide a TL;DR version: The tax prep industry has blocked free filing by organizing a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill that is anchored by House Republicans but includes Democrats like Zoe Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley.

The industry also attracted support from longtime Republican figures like Grover Norquist, who has branded proponents of free filing as “big spenders in Washington, D.C.” who are trying to “socialize all tax preparation in America.”

As you know (or will soon learn if you pursue this agenda), despite decades of resistance, the IRS recently launched a pilot program for free filing. It works pretty well, but it’ll likely remain small scale unless something changes in the current Washington status quo.

That’s where you and Vivek have a historic opportunity.

What has always struck me about Washington is its ability to resist fundamental change. People arrive with big plans for reforms and often end up becoming part of the problem.

I began my career as a Washington reporter in 1983, two years after President Ronald Reagan took office promising to upend how business was done in the capital. Reagan was serious about coming up with some concrete ideas for saving money and reducing waste. He created a presidential commission of business executives and urged its members to work like “tireless bloodhounds.”

“Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the president said.

Two years later, the commission delivered 47 volumes of reforms that it said could save $424 billion in government spending over three years. Most of the proposals required congressional action, a daunting task when the Senate was controlled by Republicans and the House by Democrats. In the end, only 27% of the recommendations were enacted. By the time Reagan’s term was over, government spending was up and the deficit had grown.

I believe Republican control of the presidency and both houses of Congress gives you and Vivek a better shot at taking on issues like free tax filing that have long been dismissed as lost causes. There’s a broad coalition of Americans who voted for Donald Trump, many of whom feel the government cares little about their problems. Politicians of both parties understand that their futures may depend on taking real, measurable steps to address those concerns.

Eliminating the annual ritual of paying money to a third party in order to tell the government what it already knows about your personal finances could be both popular and more efficient.

There has been a lot of skepticism about whether it’s possible to achieve your goal of cutting trillions of dollars from the federal budget. It appears to me that you could only rack up that level of savings by slashing everything from Medicare to military spending. I think the president’s political advisers will take the ax out of your hands before you hit the first trillion.

That’s not to say there isn’t an array of government programs that could be better run. We see our job as holding power to account, and the waste of the people’s money is one focal point of our reporting. That’s why we’ve written repeatedly about waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, the government’s two biggest health care programs. (We’ve also covered the way cuts to those programs harm people.)

I have little doubt that we will write stories in the coming years that will enrage people you know. Some of our work may even focus on you or your companies. With immense power comes immense scrutiny. (As we did several years ago, we will always reach out to you for your response before we publish anything about you.)

Still, I would be disappointed if we did not also publish a piece or two that prompted you to storm into Vivek’s office and say: “Damn, this is outrageous. We could fix this.”

Best,

Steve Engelberg

Sharing of Customer Data With Political Operatives

 <h1>Senator Slams Gun Industry’s “Invasive and Dangerous” Sharing of Customer Data With Political Operatives</h1><p>by Corey G. Johnson</p><p><em>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for <a href="https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=reprint&placement=top-note">The Big Story newsletter</a> to receive stories like this one in your inbox</em>.</p><div><p>A U.S. senator this week criticized the gun industry for secretly harvesting personal information from firearm owners for political purposes, calling it an “invasive and dangerous intrusion” of privacy and safety.</p><p>In a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25291300-bllumenthal-letter-to-nssf">letter sent</a> to the National Shooting Sports Foundation on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., questioned the legality of the “covert program” in which firearms manufacturers for years shared sensitive customer information with political operatives.</p><p>Blumenthal cited <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/gunmakers-owners-sensitive-personal-information-glock-remington-nssf">a ProPublica investigation</a> that found some of America’s most iconic gunmakers secretly participated, even while the gun industry presented itself as a privacy protector and fought against government and corporate efforts to track firearms ownership.</p><p>At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson and Remington, handed over <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25246159-nssf-bd-of-gov-agenda2-kansas-city-51801-database">hundreds of thousands</a> of names, addresses and other private data — without customer knowledge or consent — to the NSSF, which then entered the details into what would become a massive database. The database was used to rally gun owners’ electoral support for the industry’s candidates running for the White House and Congress.</p><p>Blumenthal, who chairs a Senate subcommittees on privacy, gave the NSSF a Nov. 21 deadline to answer several questions. He wanted to know more about which companies contributed information to the database, the type of customer details shared and whether the data is still being used by the organization or by others.</p><p>The senator, who served as Connecticut’s attorney general for two decades and has consistently supported legislation to reduce gun violence, said he was also “disturbed” by “glaring discrepancies” between what ProPublica uncovered and the NSSF’s previous responses to his office.</p><p>In 2022, Blumenthal sent the NSSF a list of questions after reading leaked documents that made a passing reference to the database. In <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25245645-nssf-response-to-senator-blumenthal-letter18-1">its response</a>, the NSSF would not acknowledge the database’s existence.</p><p>“The secretive compilation and sharing of private information by NSSF and its partners seems to have violated federal consumer protection laws and created substantial data privacy and safety risks for lawful gun owners,” Blumenthal wrote.</p><p>The customer information initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs. A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections.</p><p>Violating a promise of strict confidentiality on warranty cards or failing to mention that consumer information could be given to the NSSF may qualify as a deceptive practice under the Federal Trade Commission Act, privacy and legal experts said. Under the law, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how they will use their information.</p><p>The NSSF did not respond to messages seeking comment. Previously, the group defended the data collection, saying in a statement to ProPublica that any suggestion of “unethical or illegal behavior is entirely unfounded.” The statement said “these activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”</p><p>Glock and Smith & Wesson did not previously respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In the years since the data sharing program was launched, Remington has been split into two companies and sold. Remarms, which owns the old firearms division, said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.”</p><p>Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the NSSF represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. While not as well known as the chief lobbyist for gun owners, the National Rifle Association, the NSSF is respected and influential in business, political and gun-rights communities.</p><p>For two decades, the organization has raged against government and corporate attempts to amass information on gun buyers. As recently <a href="https://www.nssf.org/articles/nssf-applauds-louisiana-gov-landry-for-signing-second-amendment-financial-privacy-act/">as this year</a>, the NSSF pushed for laws that would prohibit credit card companies from creating special codes for firearms dealers, claiming the codes could be used to create a registry of gun purchasers.</p><p>As a group, gun owners are fiercely protective about their personal information. Many have good reasons. Their ranks include police officers, judges, domestic violence victims and others who have faced serious threats of harm.</p><p>The gun industry launched the data harvesting approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats.</p><p>Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25200741-nssf-bd-agenda-database-update-2002">at least 5.5 million</a> people. The information was central to what NSSF called its voter education program, which involved sending letters, postcards and later emails to persuade gun buyers to vote for the firearms industry’s preferred political candidates.</p><p>Because privacy laws shield the names of firearm purchasers from public view, the data NSSF obtained gave it a unique ability to identify and contact large numbers of gun owners or shooting sports enthusiasts. The NSSF has credited its program for helping elect both George W. Bush and Donald Trump to the White House.</p><p>In April 2016, a contractor on NSSF’s voter education project delivered a large cache of data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm credited with playing a key role in Trump’s narrow victory that year, according to internal Cambridge emails and documents. The company later went out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data.</p><p>The data given to Cambridge included 20 years of gun owners’ warranty card information as well as a separate database of customers from Cabela’s, a sporting goods retailer with approximately 70 stores in the U.S. and Canada.</p><p>Cambridge combined the NSSF data with a wide array of sensitive particulars obtained from commercial data brokers. It included people’s income, their debts, their religion, where they filled prescriptions, their children’s ages and purchases they made for their kids. For women, it revealed intimate elements such as whether the underwear and other clothes they purchased were plus size or petite.</p><p>The information was used to create psychological profiles of gun owners and assign scores to behavioral traits, such as neuroticism and agreeableness. With the NSSF supporting Trump and pro-gun congressional candidates, the profiles helped Cambridge tailor the NSSF’s political messages to voters based on their personalities.</p></div><link rel="canonical" href="https://www.propublica.org/article/blumenthal-slams-gun-industry-customer-data-investigation"><meta name="syndication-source" content="https://www.propublica.org/article/blumenthal-slams-gun-industry-customer-data-investigation"><script type="text/javascript" src="https://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" async></script>

If Trump Makes Cuts to Medicaid, Texas Officials Could Seize the Opportunity to Further Slash the Program

If Trump Makes Cuts to Medicaid, Texas Officials Could Seize the Opportunity to Further Slash the Program by Lomi Kriel and Jessica Priest ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Texas leaders have shown a decadeslong antipathy toward Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that covers millions of low-income and vulnerable residents. They declined additional federal money that, under the Affordable Care Act, would have allowed Medicaid to offer health care coverage to more low-income families. The state was among the last to insure women for an entire year after they gave birth. And when the federal government last year ended a policy that required states to keep people on their Medicaid rolls during the coronavirus pandemic, Texas officials rushed to kick off those they deemed ineligible, ignoring persistent warnings that the speedy process could lead to some people being wrongfully removed. Come January, when Donald Trump assumes the presidency for the second time, Texas leaders could get another opportunity to whittle down the program — this time with fewer constraints. Trump has not shared any plans to cut Medicaid, which covers about 80 million Americans, and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Health care advocates and experts, however, say that his past efforts to scale back the program, as well as positions taken by conservative groups and Republican lawmakers who back him, indicate that it would likely be a target for severe reductions. “We expect the Republicans to move very quickly to cut Medicaid dramatically and indeed end its guarantee of coverage as it exists today,” said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families in Washington, D.C. Currently, the federal government picks up, on average, nearly 70% of Medicaid spending, with states assuming the remaining costs. (A state’s share varies based mostly on what percentage of its residents are impoverished.) Any decisions to cut federal spending would likely lead states to shrink the number of people they deem eligible and the care that enrollees are entitled to receive, Alker and other experts said. That would be particularly devastating in Texas, which already has one of the country’s lowest percentages of residents covered through Medicaid and where officials lack the political will to make up the difference in funding with state money, experts say. Parents with two children, for example, must earn less than $285 monthly to qualify for Medicaid for themselves. “Our elected officials would have to decide whether they want to cut health care for pregnant women, kids, people with disabilities, or seniors because that is essentially who Medicaid covers in Texas,” Adriana Kohler, a policy director for Texans Care for Children, a statewide nonprofit that advocates for families, said in a statement. Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and the state’s Health and Human Services Commission did not respond to repeated requests for comment. During Abbott’s prior role as the state’s attorney general, he helped to lead a successful lawsuit against the federal government, ensuring that states did not risk losing Medicaid funding entirely if they didn’t want to cover more residents as part of the Affordable Care Act. Even when Texas does offer Medicaid coverage to its most vulnerable residents, state officials enabled a system that creates often insurmountable barriers to receiving care. A 2018 Dallas Morning News investigation found that some of the insurance companies Texas hired to administer Medicaid benefits systematically denied expensive and, at times, life-saving treatments to bolster profits. Critics say problems with the system persist despite legislative reforms spurred by that series of stories. Texas insures more than 4 million residents through Medicaid, which amounts to a smaller percentage of its total population than almost any other state. But given its sheer size, the state still covers the third most people in the nation, behind only California and New York. The program provides health care for 3 in 8 children, 3 in 5 nursing home residents and 2 in 7 people with disabilities in Texas, according to KFF, a national health policy research organization. It is the top funder for nursing homes and long-term care services for the disabled and elderly, and it pays for nearly half of all births in the state. Michael Morgan, a 75-year-old retired nurse who lives in Fort Worth, is among those who worry that if Trump caps or cuts the amount of money the federal government spends on Medicaid, the state could make it even harder to get coverage for his daughter Hannah. She has Down syndrome and schizencephaly, a brain malformation, and she is deaf and partially blind, she doesn’t speak, and she needs assistance to walk and eat. Morgan is depleting his limited savings to pay for Hannah’s health care expenses after she lost Medicaid coverage earlier this year when she turned 19. He submitted a new application for her in May — she should qualify for Medicaid because of her disabilities. State officials denied her coverage in November, arguing that Morgan did not meet the deadline to return a form providing his consent for the agency to access his daughter’s medical and financial records. Morgan, who plans to appeal the denial, said in an interview that he received the form a day before the deadline. “I don’t know how much more they can cut it,” he said of Medicaid in Texas. During his first term, Trump tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which provides health coverage to 45 million Americans. His administration also repeatedly supported spending caps for Medicaid, including block grants that would give states a fixed amount of federal funding, no matter how many people needed the insurance or how much their health care cost. Currently, Medicaid covers all people who qualify, no matter the expense. While those efforts did not significantly advance during Trump’s first term, Republicans will hold majorities in both the House and the Senate come January, and they have signaled an openness to impose caps on spending and establish requirements that most adults in the program hold jobs. They argue that Medicaid spending is unsustainable and that the program is susceptible to waste, fraud and abuse. Republicans who have supported such measures include U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Lubbock Republican who leads the House Budget Committee. GOP policy primers — including Project 2025, published by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, and one from the Republican Study Committee, a conservative congressional caucus — have also called for cutting Medicaid. Arrington, whose spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, told reporters last month that he supported a “responsible and reasonable work requirement.” Harvard University health professors who studied a previous work mandate in Arkansas that Trump allowed during his first term found that most adults using Medicaid were already employed or qualified for an exemption, but thousands of residents still lost health care, at least in part because of the onerous process of continuously proving their eligibility. This is not the first time Arrington has pushed work requirements and sought to lower the share of health care costs that the federal government pays to states. He previously proposed cutting federal Medicaid spending by more than a quarter, or $1.9 trillion. Cornyn, whose spokespeople also repeatedly declined to comment, said last month that he would not support cuts to Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors and the disabled, or to Social Security. Still, he suggested that Medicaid cuts were on the table. “We can’t just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them,” Cornyn told Politico Pro, adding that “block grants make a lot of sense.” William T. Smith, a 65-year-old retired construction worker who lives along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, said that he voted for Trump partly because he agrees that “there’s too much fat” and supports cutting some federal programs. Smith has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which affects his lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. He said he also has bipolar disorder, sleep apnea and chronic pain after decades of performing manual labor. Smith said Medicaid, which he has been trying to get since the summer, should not be where the federal government looks to reduce expenses. Instead, he said, the federal government should take savings from cutting other programs and put the money toward more people’s care. “I don’t think they’re going to yank health care away from people,” he said. “If they do, I’d be really angry.” Caught in Texas’ Medicaid and Food Stamp Application Backlog? Know Someone Who Is? Help Us Report. Dan Keemahill contributed reporting.

Canada UNITES to PUSH BACK HARD against Trump BULLYING

Hilarious! Jimmy Kimmel’s Epic Commentary on Trump Threatening Panama Ca...

🚨 President Biden EXCLUSIVE Interview with MeidasTouch

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas interviews President Biden in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of The White House about his legacy, accomplishments, regrets, future, and more. Interview recorded on December 16, 2024.

Donald Trump’s victory has boosted shares in private-prison companies

Donald Trump’s victory has boosted shares in private-prison companies

AS the dust settled on Donald Trump’s election victory, what businesses did investors think would benefit most from his return to the presidency? Tesla? Big oil? Rustbelt manufacturers? No: two firms that lock people up. Shares in GEO Group and Core Civic, which own and run prisons, soared by two-thirds in the three days after the election, beating the rest of America’s 1,500 most valuable firms.

Chain gangs, free labour, and kickbacks that are very profitable; just like the sharecropping cotton days in the south? All part of the monetization of the presidency and new homes for the deported immigrants?  

Singh joins Poilievre in non confidence vote

 Poilievre says House should be recalled as NDP vows to vote down Liberal government | CBC News

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says the House of Commons should be recalled now that NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is vowing to bring forward a motion of non-confidence to take down the Liberal government.

"The Liberals don't deserve another chance," Singh wrote in an open letter on Friday. "That's why the NDP will vote to bring this government down."

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Poilievre said the House shouldn't wait until it comes back from the winter break in January.

Canada gives STRONG MESSAGE to Trump’s FACE…HEATING UP!

Tom Hartmann

 — Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy? Donald Trump only got about a million more votes than he did in 2020, but Kamala Harris appears to have received somewhere between 6 and 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did that year. For the over two decades that I’ve been writing and on the radio and TV, I’ve argued that when Bill Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 (and Obama maintained that position) the Democratic Party had taken a fatal turn to the right. I’ve written two books that cover it, in part, as well: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream. It appears that millions of voters essentially said, “I’m not going to vote for that nutcase Trump, but Harris isn’t speaking to the explosion in my cost-of-living expenses so to hell with her, too.” Joe Biden campaigned with Bernie Sanders and won; Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and repeatedly said she wanted to give Republicans “a seat at the table,” which may well have been a fatal error. She thought she could pick up moderate Republicans, but there’s apparently not such a thing anymore since Fox “News” and the massive rightwing media ecosystem has come to dominate the American news and opinion landscape. Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Sherrod Brown, and many other longtime Democrats have been pointing to this pre-1992 truth: if the Democratic Party is to win, it has to go back to its FDR/LBJ roots and become the party of the bottom 90 percent, instead of embracing those with a college education, movie and rock stars, and progressive billionaires like Mark Cuban. God bless them all, but Dems really need to reinvent themselves as the blue-collar party and repudiate much of the Clinton/Obama agenda of low taxes, free trade, and private/public partnerships (like Obamacare). Amazingly, even The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks agrees, writing: “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. [This is actually an untrue GOP talking point.] … As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.” Amen. Finally, check out this troubling article from data scientist Stephen Spoonamore raising questions about manipulation of vote totals in the swing states in a way that doesn’t appear in the non-swing states. I’m agnostic on this for the moment, but it’s worth reading; he’ll be on my program Monday.

— In an authoritarian regime it’s important to cow and control the news, and here we go. Kash Patel, widely rumored to be Trump’s main pick for FBI director, has a message for reporters and opinion writers who insist on continuing to call Trump a fascist or otherwise slander/defame him and his followers: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you... Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.” According to The Columbia Journalism Review, Trump has already sued The New York Times (naming reporters Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner) and Penguin Random House (one of my publishers) and CBS’s 60 Minutes show for $10 billion each. As I predicted, he appears to be following the Putin/Orbán strategy of bankrupting media outlets and reporters (rather than using cops and billy-clubs), presumably both to cow others into submission and to make the media properties available to be purchased by his allies (sort of like what just happened with The Onion buying Infowars out of bankruptcy). Steve Bannon added his thoughts, essentially threatening or warning the journalists at MSNBC: “Weissman, you were on TV with MSNBC and all the producers, MSNBC. Preserve your documents. Ari Melber and all you hosts. Preserve your documents. All of it. You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call mom and dad tonight. Mom and dad, ‘You know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up.” This is a dangerous time for anybody writing about politics. Orbán and Putin even go after random citizens who criticize them on social media; will Trump go that far? And will progressives shut up in the face of this kind of intimidation? Stay tuned…

— Speaking of authoritarianism, Texas Republicans want to outlaw websites that discuss how to get an abortion. Jessica Valenti tells the story at Abortion, Every Day on Substack about the Republican lawmakers in Texas (and around the country) who are trying to pass legislation that would imprison people who put up websites that can be viewed in Texas (including hers) with information on abortion. They argue that abortion information is not free speech protected by the Constitution. I’d add that if the Comstock Act is enforced by the new Attorney General (as JD Vance has demanded) next year, all sorts of information about abortion will become criminalized, in addition to the devices and drugs that can be used for both abortion and birth control.

— Sarah Hurst’s Russia Report on Tulsi Gabbard will make your toes curl. I’ll let you click on it and read it yourself; it’s all about her repeated embraces of Russia and Putin. Which makes some people wonder out loud why Trump would push such objectionable candidates; surely the Senate will protect us from such people, right? But if Trump really wants to pull a Hitler and seize absolute control of the nation within a matter of a few months, his first move would be to either negotiate or force a recess of the Senate and simply “recess appoint” all of his cabinet nominees. No hearings, no tough questions, no FBI or other background checks, no Democratic politicians’ input. He has this authority under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution: if there’s a disagreement between John Thune and Mike Johnson about when to adjourn, “...and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he [the president] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” They could agree to disagree; that way they could both evade responsibility. On the other hand, if Thune simply gives in to Trump’s recent demand for recess appointments (as he told reporters yesterday he was considering), Thune can simply adjourn the Senate, something that hasn’t happened in decades; Trump can then simply do his own recess appointments (it could be done in a single hour) under the Constitution’s provision: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” or he could just appoint them as “acting“ officials. He did that during the last year of his presidency, and went way beyond the legal time limit for several; he flagrantly broke the law last time with over 15 cabinet members and Republicans were unwilling to call him on it, although he never started that way. This will be our first clue that the nation is no longer a constitutional republic with anything resembling checks and balances, but has become an oligarchic dictatorship like Hungary.

— Blueprint of destruction: Is Trump following Orbán’s and Putin’s road to power? M. Gessen, an expert on authoritarianism, writes in The New York Times: “When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what Magyar calls an ‘autocratic breakthrough,’ changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again. It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image. … Kamala Harris’s campaign, of course, tried to warn Americans about this and a lot more, labeling Trump a fascist. … It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition.” The article is definitely worth a read, chilling as it is. Gessen even gets into the role of Project 2025 in facilitating the transformation of our American form of government into one with a single strongman president at its pinnacle. This does not bode well for America.

— Former Trump administration officials who turned on him are preparing to flee the country. The Washington Post is reporting: “A retired U.S. Army officer who clashed with senior officials in Donald Trump’s first White House looked into acquiring Italian citizenship in the run-up to this month’s election but wasn’t eligible and instead packed a ‘go bag’ with cash and a list of emergency numbers in case he needs to flee. A member of Trump’s first administration who publicly denounced him is applying for foreign citizenship and weighing whether to watch and wait or leave the country before the Jan. 20 inauguration. And a former U.S. official who signed a notorious October 2020 letter suggesting that emails purportedly taken from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden could be part of a ‘Russian information operation’is seeking a passport from a European country, uncertain about whether the getaway will prove necessary but concluding, ‘You don’t want to have to scramble.’” Reports (like this one from the Post) suggest that Trump has an “enemies list” of at least 600 people, much like Nixon’s, and he intends to go after everybody on the list on day one. Will he, like Nixon, just harass people with IRS audits? It seems more likely based on his own words that he’ll launch criminal and civil actions to jail or bankrupt his perceived enemies and those who have written or said things that have offended him. Along those same lines, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wants “justice” against health officials: “Dr. [Anthony] Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people. He lied, and many, many people died. … People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I’m pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen.” Washington, DC is very, very much on edge right now; I got a call Friday morning at 5:30 in the morning from the CEO of a major DC-based progressive media outlet who’d just gotten off the phone with a Clinton colleague; both are considering leaving the country. This is getting real very, very fast.

— Are Republicans coming for healthcare for both retired and working people?Millions of people signed up for Affordable Care Act insurance policies over the past three years because of hefty subsidies contained in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Those subsidies expire at the end of this year, and Republicans are signaling that they won’t be renewed, meaning that premiums could go from $200 a month to as much as $2400 a month. Meanwhile, Project 2025 has called for private corporate Medicare Advantage plans to become the default option for people turning 65 and signing up for Medicare. Once a critical threshold is hit (currently more than half of seniors are on the Advantage plans) it’ll be fairly easy for a Republican congress and president to end legacy Medicare; once that happens, Advantage plans, no longer having competition from real Medicare, will almost certainly become more expensive and offer less coverage. Meanwhile, Raw Story is reporting: “Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told reporters earlier this week that the GOP is looking to use the filibuster-evading reconciliation process to pursue cuts to ‘mandatory programs’—a category that includes Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” Republicans have been talking about this since the ReaganRevolution, but never actually tried (other than Reagan raising the retirement age from 65 to 67). Get ready.

— State-level authoritarians fall in line with Trump. Oklahoma’s Channel 4 (KFOR) TV News reports: “Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters emailed leaders in Oklahoma school districts on Thursday telling them they would be required to play their students and parents a video showing Walters blaming the ‘radical left’ and ‘woke teachers unions’ for ‘attacking’ religious liberty, then inviting students to join him as he prays for President-elect Donald Trump.” Walters also reportedly purchased five hundred Trump Bibles for Oklahoma schools. Welcome to the Brave New World. Compounding a religious grift with a financial one; breathtaking.