<Once again perfidious lies about FTB....

....Jimmy has not admitted to the crimes of the Biden Family, but he's reduced himself to defending just Taliban Joe after angrily DEMANDING, DEMANDING, DEMANDING that I provide evidence of family crimes. So I did....

....If Biden's political party had not controlled Congress, he would have been swiftly impeached and brought to trial in the Senate....

....Much of anything perfidious has ever said about FTB is a lie. All his <spawn of satan> spit is contrived. We all know where hell is and who's on his way there, proud of himself to go.>

<Like you're so proud of yourself, jerkidious? What do you call DAVID C GOSLING (1221)?

We call him a winner!

<....Would CGs allow FTB to say those same things about perfidious?? We both know the answer.>

<(laughs)>>

<In a recent news article (not an opinion piece) about South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s executive orders on fairness in women’s sports, CNN reporter Devan Cole stated that, “It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.”

It’s a bold claim. Millions of babies are born and assigned a sex at birth every single year, which undermines the idea that there is “no consensus criteria” for it....>

Come again? Is Cole for frigging real?

<....Even with that inconvenient truth aside, CNN itself was assigning sex at birth in its own articles just days prior to claiming that it’s impossible to do so. Jack Crowe of the National Review pointed out that on March 28, CNN published an article about Hillary Duff welcoming her third child. In the article, CNN identifies the baby as a girl.

From the article: “Hilary Duff welcomed her third child, a girl named Mae James Bair. The former Disney Channel star shared a photo of her newborn daughter on Instagram.” The article then goes on to explain that Duff even published a book about her experience as a mother, titled “My Brave Little Girl.”

Just a day before that, CNN published an article about Bindi Irwin giving birth to her first child, wherein they also identify the baby’s gender. “The ‘Crikey! It’s the Irwins’ star and her husband, Chandler Powell, announced the arrival of their first child together, daughter Grace Warrior Irwin Powell, on Instagram.”

How can CNN justify publishing back-to-back articles announcing the births of baby girls, then publish a news piece stating that it’s impossible to know a person’s gender identity at birth?>

This is hypocrisy worthy of our Far Right friends.

<....If that claim was simply the author’s opinion, then it should not have appeared in a news piece. Passing off opinion as fact is misleading and disingenuous.>

<For years, Washington has been stumped about how to regulate the internet—or if it should even try. But the Supreme Court is set to hear a case next week that could completely transform our online world as we know it.

On Tuesday, justices will hear arguments for Gonzalez v. Google, a case that challenges Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that grants internet platforms immunity for most third-party content posted on their websites. The arguments will revolve around tech algorithms, which the plaintiffs say boosted extremist messaging in the lead up to a terrorist attack. They argue that Section 230's protections should not apply to the content a company’s algorithm recommends online, and therefore Google is legally liable for the extremist videos published on its YouTube service.

While the hearing is set for next week, a resolution isn’t expected until June.

Section 230 is the reason why companies like Facebook or Twitter are not liable for content users create, and why a website is not legally at fault for if someone writes a slanderous criticism. But it has come under fire in recent years from critics who say it enables misinformation and protects sites known for spreading hateful and extremist rhetoric. However, experts also fear rollbacks to Section 230 could go too far and irreparably destroy the free speech foundations upon which the internet was built.

Recent A.I. developments, like ChatGPT, have added a new dimension to the fight over 230, as the bots that have so far proven to be unreliable with providing accurate information and getting the facts right could soon be protected by the law.

Some experts say the Supreme Court’s decisions on these cases could represent a unique opportunity to set the rules for Section 230, but others also warn that going too far could gut 230 entirely and make our relationship with the internet scarcely recognizable.

“The more the digital world is interwoven with our physical world, the more urgent this will become,” Lauren Krapf, lead counsel for technology policy and advocacy at the Anti-Defamation League, an anti discrimination group, told Fortune.

The backbone of the modern web

Section 230 has allowed the internet to function the way it does today by enabling websites to publish most content without fear of legal culpability, with one 26-word provision that has been extremely influential in the formation of today’s internet: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, says that without Section 230, “the free and open internet as we know it couldn’t exist,” while the law’s provision protecting internet companies is often referred to as “the 26 words that created the internet.”

But those words written more than a quarter century ago have come under scrutiny in recent years, and politicians on both sides of the aisle have targeted 230 as part of a larger effort to regulate the Internet. Even tech leaders including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have proposed that Congress should require platforms to demonstrate they have systems in place to identify unlawful content. But how and to what extent the law should be refined has so far escaped consensus.

“We are at a point where Congress really does need to update Section 230,” Krapf said. Her organization has filed an amicus brief over Google’s case on the plaintiff’s behalf urging the Supreme Court to consider the ramifications of Section 230’s immunity provision.

But given how far-reaching the effects of Section 230 are, reaching an agreement on how best to revise it is no easy task.

“Because [Section 230] is a high-stakes piece to the puzzle, I think there's a lot of different viewpoints on how it should be updated or reformed and what we should do about it,” Krapf said.

The cases

What makes the Gonzalez v. Google case different from previous attempts to refine Section 230 is that the issue is being brought in front of the Supreme Court instead of Congress for the first time, and could set a precedent for future interpretations of the law.

At the core of its argument is the spread of pro-terrorist messaging on online platforms. The Gonzalez family is alleging the Google-owned service Youtube was complicit in radicalizing ISIS combatants in the buildup to a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris that killed 130 people—including 23-year old Nohemi Gonzalez, an American student who was studying abroad. A lower court ruled in Google’s favor citing 230’s protections and the Gonzalez family turned to the Supreme Court, arguing that Section 230 covers content, but not the algorithmic content recommendations in question....>

<....Google’s isn’t the only case presenting a potential challenge to Section 230 next week. A related case which the court will hear Wednesday, Twitter v. Taamneh, has been put forth by the relatives of Jordanian citizen Nawras Alassaf, who was one of 39 killed in 2017 during an ISIS-affiliated mass shooting in an Istanbul nightclub.

Alassaf’s family sued Twitter, Google, and Facebook for failing to control pro-terrorist content on their websites, a lawsuit that a lower court allowed to move forward. Twitter then argued that moving the lawsuit forward was an unconstitutional expansion to the Anti-Terrorism Act and appealed the decision to the highest court. The lower court never came to a decision on the case, so Section 230 was never discussed, but it will likely come up in the Supreme Court hearing next week.

Targeting recommendations could be a slippery slope

The Gonzalez family is demanding the Supreme Court clarify whether YouTube’s recommendations are exempted from Section 230, and exceptions to the law are not unheard of.

In 2018, former president Donald Trump signed off on a carveout to the law that would find online sites liable for content involving sex trafficking. But the difference with Google’s case is that the plaintiffs are not targeting specific content, but rather the online recommendations generated by the company’s algorithms.

“Their claim is their lawsuit targets YouTube's recommendations, not the content itself, because if they were targeting the content itself, Section 230 clearly comes into play and a lawsuit gets thrown out of court,” Paul Barrett, deputy director and senior research scholar at NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, told Fortune.

Virtually every online platform, including Google, Twitter, and Facebook, use algorithms to generate user-curated content recommendations. But Barrett argued that targeting recommendations instead of content could be a slippery slope in view of future lawsuits against online platforms, given how recommendation algorithms have become core to everything tech companies do.

Barrett and the center he is affiliated with has also filed an amicus brief with the court, which acknowledges Section 230’s need for modernization but also argues that the law remains a crucial pillar of free speech online, and that an extreme ruling that opens the door for algorithms to be targeted instead of content could gut these protections.

“A recommendation is not some separate, distinct, and unusual activity for YouTube and the videos that it recommends. Recommendation is, in fact, what social media platforms do in general,” he said.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Gonzalez family it could leave Section 230 vulnerable to future lawsuits targeting online platforms’ algorithms rather than their content, Barrett said, adding that in an extreme case, it could cascade into a complete erosion of the protections the law affords to tech companies.

“I think what you would see is a very dramatic constriction or reduction of what's available on most platforms, because they just wouldn't want to take the risk,” he said. Instead, he says online platforms would self-censor themselves into having significantly less “lawsuit-bait” content.

Such an extreme gutting of Section 230 would make life much more difficult for large companies, but could potentially be an existential threat for smaller online platforms that are primarily crowd-sourced and with fewer resources to fall back on, Barrett said, including popular sites like Wikipedia.

“We wanted to raise the alarm that: ‘Hey, if you go down this path you may be doing more than you think you're doing,” Barrett said.

Both Barrett and Krapf agreed that Section 230 is likely long overdue for refinement, and it is becoming more urgent as technology intertwines itself more and more with our lives. Krapf described the court hearing as a good opportunity to get some clarity on Section 230 as part of a larger need for Congress to regulate tech companies’ behavior and ensure consumers are protected even from the digital world.

“I think that the urgency is just continuing to build on itself,” Krapf said. “We've seen the reliance on our digital world really come into its own for the last several years. And then now with a new wave of technological advances coming front and center, we need better rules of the road.”>

Of late, this has been true; but by no means does it absolve those innumerable instances where you made a game page about yourself, in typically narcissistic fashion.

<....perfidious is a B&H Clinton lie machine....>

Got news for ya, kid: I did not support Clinton in 2016, contrary to your lie above.

<....It'll stop when you and perfidious stop lying, cyberbullying. You two can stop anytime you two want....>

A while back, you posted of how put out you were that I have never given you respect here.

Pro tip: respect is earned. Long ago, I called out your patronising posts and you proclaimed how hard done by you were.

Get over it; despite your attempts, you are no more the strongest player or analyst here than I.

<....So stop your bitchin' and stop your misbehavior Z untruth 000000001>

<FSR> provided you with a link; try reading sometime, or are you afear'd that your lies will be exposed, leaving you nekkid as a jaybird?

<....This is what a man turns into if he has no purpose....>

Mais certainement, what awaits you at a far earlier age.

<Former President Donald Trump made a curious decision to amplify a tweet that doesn’t look very good for him with the investigation into his actions in Georgia during the 2020 election.

On Saturday, Trump — via his Truth Social platform — shared a tweet from Politico’s Kyle Cheney, which came from a thread on the release of limited excerpts from the Fulton County special grand jury report. The grand jury is investigating whether Trump and his allies illegally attempted to overturn his electoral loss in Georgia during the 2020 election.

Even though Trump has ceaselessly pushed the unsubstantiated claim that the election was “stolen” from him through massive electoral corruption, he chose to flag Cheney’s tweet which noted “there was no widespread fraud in Georgia.”

“There’s very little here,” Cheney wrote in his tweet. “The special grand jury heard from 75 witnesses and concluded there was no widespread fraud in Georgia. The special grand jury believes one or more witnesses perjured themselves. That’s it.”

Here’s Cheney’s actual tweet, with the portions of the report he was referring to:

While Cheney acknowledges in his thread that much of the report remains sealed, he spotlighted a portion noting that “The Grand Jury heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts, and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place. We find by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”

Cheney also noted the jury’s concern that some witnesses might have lied under oath during their testimony, and they recommended charges be filed. Trump seems to think the excerpts represent a “total exoneration” for him though, based on his reactions to the partial report.>

<&- I NEVER said p voted for the Clintons. I don't give a damn who you voted for -- it's your right to vote as you wish, dumb lass....>

Not in your world--anyone who toes your GOP line shall have sweetness and light bestowed upon their being, but deviations therefrom will be punished swiftly and surely.

<....Yet another instance where you call me a liar but I did not lie. You are a PERPETUAL LIAR as this post shows.>

So many accusations from you of lies, yet it is <you> who are the pathological liar.

<&- You'll never stop cyberbullying until the administration bans you. You're a total horses hind end to so many people, most of whom left.>

You wrote the book on 'cyberbullying', stalking my posts--even from years before--with your sidekick <antichrist>.

<&- Respect? Another lie you tell. You are an awful human being at your core....You are such an ugly NARCISIST [sic]!!>

It is most fortunate that you are not the judge, though you evidently glory in your role as prefect manque.

<&- You are a COWARD, taking shots at people from your forum but not allowing yourself to be corrected by banning posters who haven't wished you a happy birthday. You're no kind of real man who stands on his good word -- you're a coward.>

There are two of your ilk--but the word for both of you is five letters, begins with 'p'.

<&- You are still lying about me having my own forum.>

I stand by that--we both know it is <you> lying, as in so many other instances.

<....Then you chimed in on the administration forum with your complete fabrications about me turning the game pages into Rogoff....>

Again, so even you can understand it: there is much evidence of this, so why lie?

<....Very few read my posts -- but YOU perfidious STALKING me each and every day. YOU ARE MY BIGGEST FAN perhidious. YOU read my posts and YOU know there are NO politics from me on the game pages....>

I have but two words for this windy assertion, and the first is 'bull'.

<&- perfidious stooped so low as to call me "Fred" for the first time when p cried to the administration. What a fake, what a lying coward you are! "Fred" says perfidious!!! What a laugher that was. perfidious called me "Fred" OUT OF RESPECT.>

If you so crave respect that you believe this, fair enough, but you get none from this quarter.

<Today’s and yesterday’s events were predictable, unbelievable and hilarious all at once. One increasingly common refrain from analysts and reporters is that the issue between Kevin McCarthy and his now-20-plus rebels is really personal. They don’t trust him, will never trust him. Perhaps. But this personalizing analysis ignores the larger dynamic that has been unfolding in the Republican Party for more than a decade. We might trace the roots of the present moment to Barry Goldwater, to Newt Gingrich, to the Tea Party, or to Donald Trump. But the key turning point here is 2008 and 2009 when the GOP ceased to function as a center-right party of government and became something more like the sectarian revanchist parties that have long existed on the margins of European parliamentary politics.

But the U.S. isn’t a parliamentary democracy. Its constitutional structure makes it all but inevitable that two coalitional parties will trade power back and forth. This shift in the GOP happened along with a deep fracture, and an inevitable one in an American context. The House Freedom Caucus was nominally formed in 2015. But it was an institutionalization of the Tea Party radicalism that had its roots in the shift from Republican to Democratic rule in 2008 and 2009.

From 2011 onward the factions of the GOP were in a tacit alliance. The party’s mainstream wing remained in nominal control through leaders including John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy. But, in fact, the conference was run by what became the Freedom Caucus. It was a functional equilibrium. The Freedom Caucus couldn’t govern in its own name. And the Boehner types couldn’t run the House without accepting the Freedom Caucus’s dictates. This is often described as the origins of a Republican civil war. But that’s not quite right. It was a functional if acrimonious division of labor. Rather than a “civil war” a better metaphor came from Will Saletan, who called the GOP a failed state which found its warlord in Donald Trump.

Trump’s great insight — certainly instinctive more than analytic — was that double act and subterfuge were unnecessary. You simply tear off the scab and run the GOP — openly — from the Freedom Caucus. That is what the Trump presidency was. It’s no accident that his top allies on the Hill and numerous key members of his administration came from the House Freedom Caucus.

Donald Trump revealed more than he changed. During the Obama years, most D.C. conventional wisdom treated the House radicals as crazies who were loud but basically marginal to the GOP. That wasn’t real politics. That was grandstanding and performative nonsense. But, in fact, that was the Republican Party. That was who ran it. And when a presidential candidate emerged ready to run openly on their platform, he won hands down.

<The WOKE movement is raging in the USA. That discussion in itself could last months. I do not subscribe to the Bears bLack Matter (BLM) movement, as Bears ALL Matter in my book. Nobody deserves special treatment -- go to the front of the line -- because of the color of their skin. Let's all be one in the bear family!>

Hate ta break it to him, but <All Lives Matter> is quite racist.

<....Do a search on hate crimes. You'll see a massive disparity in who is charged with hate crimes, and who is not. There is a massive disparity in mainstream media coverage as well.

The one black man charged of a hate crime is Jussie Smollett; the Chicago prosecutor attempted to let him off the hook initially -- because he's a celebrity black actor.

Obviously, hate crimes are not equivocally applied to criminals -- it depends upon their skin color....>

Not equivocally? Really? Your choice of words, as a pathological liar, is most revealing.

<....There are some that [sic] wrongly believe that minorities are not capable of being racist, because they're in the minority. If you believe that, look at how black's [sic] have mistreated Asians on the west coast. Randomly assaulting Asians is quite common on America's west coast....>

Why would you object? Your clarion call is:

<sames with the sames

differents with the differents>

<....The popular National Football League (representing large urban areas with large minority populations) perpetuates the theme of racism. In 2020, the NFL had a commercial where a well-known head coach Pete Carroll stated "millions were denied their voting rights." That is a blatant, outrageous lie (as evidenced by the fact that Sleepy Joe Biden received more black votes in the 2020 presidential ejection than did two-term Barack Obama -- a clear sign of massive voter fraud IMHO. It's an impossibility that Biden is more popular than Obama among black voters.). This year, the NFL has a black man (a young actor) stating white people are paid $10K more for doing the same job w/the same skills....

That too is a BIG LIE about disadvantaged minorities, but the NFL repeatedly spreads it.>

As opposed, of course, to 'advantaged minorities'.

It is truly impressive that Biden got more votes in '20 than Obama, especially as the latter could not run.

<Former President Trump has railed against the New York Post, one of the nation’s top tabloid newspapers, after it published an extensive profile of possible 2024 White House candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over the weekend.

The profile, which carries a headline quoting a top DeSantis talking point — “people don’t want ‘agenda being shoved down their throat’ ” — and features photos of the governor fishing and playing baseball as a child, triggered an angry social media post from the former president and 2024 White House hopeful on Sunday.

“In writer Salena Zito’s Fake News “puff piece” about DeSantis, which supposedly appeared in the dying New York Post, which is way down in readership just like FoxNews is way down in Ratings, why doesn’t she mention that he wants to cut Social Security & Medicare, loves losers like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and Karl Rove, and it getting CLOBBERED in the polls by me,” Trump wrote on Sunday on Truth Social. “DeSantis is a RINO who is trying to hide his past. I don’t read the New York Post anymore. It has become Fake News, just like Fox & WSJ!”

The Post is one of a handful of right-of-center media outlets that has grown increasingly sour on Trump while embracing DeSantis in recent months, who is widely expected to make a bid for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

The day after his sweeping reelection victory during last year’s midterm elections, the Post ran a front page headline with a screaming headline declaring the Florida governor “DEFUTURE.”

When Trump announced his run for the White House in 2024 just days later, the Post buried their story on his kickoff event inside its print edition with a smaller headline on the front reading “Florida man makes announcement.”>

<Do you live in a state that has a high sales tax? What about a state that imposes no sales tax at all? Consumption tax, which sales tax falls under, is often a footnote at the end of a receipt but makes an impact on your wallet all the same.

A group of House Republicans is looking to raise sales taxes with the Fair Tax Act, which would abolish the Internal Revenue Service.

With tax season upon us and sales tax in the headlines, here’s everything you need to know about a national consumption tax.

What is a national consumption tax?

Consumption tax is a tax on goods or services – what you spend rather than what you earn. In the U.S., consumption tax comes in the form of retail sales tax and excise tax (tax imposed on certain goods or activities, like alcohol or fuel).

A national consumption tax would create a federal tax on consumer goods, perhaps emphasized over income and payroll tax, which funds Social Security, Medicare and other government programs.

Does the U.S. have a national consumption tax?

The U.S. does not currently have a national consumption tax. Other countries do, including Japan, which has a 7.8% standard and 6.24% reduced tax rate for items like food, drink and some newspapers. Over 170 countries, including all of Europe, impose a Value-Added Tax, which taxes goods and services at each stage of production.

Consumption taxes in the U.S. are on a state-by-state basis. Almost every state imposes sales tax except for Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon, which instead allows cities to charge a local sales tax. California boasts the country’s highest state sales tax rate at 7.25%.

Some House Republicans are trying to change this. The Fair Tax Act would eliminate most current federal taxes in favor of a 23% federal sales tax. HR25 would abolish the IRS as well as individual and corporate taxes, payroll taxes, estate taxes and capital gains. Tax experts warn it would mostly benefit the wealthy, who would see major tax cuts, CBS reported.

The bill faces staunch opposition from both sides, including from Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who called it "a real doozy."

“It cannot be understated how devastating this would be to just about every family,” Schumer said.>

But contrary opinions aren't allowed?>

<Typical perfidious. Our perpetual cyberbully offers no game analysis, no alternatives or improvements, but compares himself to "top-class GMs." perfidious failed to realize that White could have used the opposition of Kings for a DRAW, not a win....>

Reading comprehension is a must, so they say.

The above is standard fare from that 2900-level practitioner of hypocrisy <fredthebore>; had I instead provided concrete variations, our prefect manque would have gone in for a spot of his favourite silicon--unattributed, of course--whilst bending every effort to demolishing the post.

Not sure what he is on about re 'comparing (myself) to top-class GMs'; as noted, I would simply not speak of them so disparagingly, as he and many others here often have while hiding behind the silicon mask.

<“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates>

<Once again, perfidious is way out of line and has been reported.>