geekwithsoul

Recent video purportedly showing a man destroying ballots marked for Trump is a disinformation campaign, say officials

Russian actors were behind a viral video falsely showing mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in the swing state of Pennsylvania, US officials said on Friday, amid heightened alert over foreign influence operations targeting the upcoming election.

The video, which garnered millions of views on platforms such as the Elon Musk-owned X, purports to show a man sorting through mail-in ballots from the state’s Bucks county and ripping up those cast for the former president.

A shady new super PAC named for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just spent nearly $20 million on efforts to help Donald Trump appear more moderate on abortion, but the group won’t reveal where its money comes from until after the election.

The pro-Trump RBG PAC (a massive insult to the late justice, who hated Trump) is attempting to use the liberal justice’s legacy to try and boost Trump ahead of the election. Its website even features photos of Ginsberg and the former president, captioned “Great Minds Think Alike.”

This spring, an eye-opening poll from Axios suggested what once seemed unthinkable: Four in 10 Democrats were open to the idea of the US government deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. Though that share of support might seem high, other polls conducted since have found something similar, suggesting Americans at large are open to harsher, more Trumpian immigration policies.

And yet, as attention-grabbing as some of the headlines on support for mass deportations have been (and as Donald Trump and his allies continue to talk about his plans for such), those polls may not accurately capture the mood of the American electorate. Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on two related complications: substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail, as well as a generalized desire to do something — anything — on immigration, which polls frequently report to be among Americans’ top issues.

That disconnect is because standalone polls and headlines do very little to capture the complexity of many Americans’ feelings about immigration, which often include simultaneous, and apparently contradictory, support for more immigrant-friendly policies alongside draconian ones. The real answer, more specific polling by firms like Pew Research Center suggests, lies somewhere in the middle: A good share of voters, it seems, are fine with increasing deportations. Some might even want the kind of operation Trump is floating. But many also want exceptions and protections for specific groups of immigrants who have been living in the US for a while, or have other ties to the country.

I guess that's at least a little better, but goddamn I still don't understand it.

When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.

Citing the American revolution while misspelling “Britian”, Donald Trump’s campaign has filed an extraordinary complaint against the UK’s Labour party for what it claims is “interference” in the US presidential election.

"The intelligence community assesses that Russian influence actors created and amplified content alleging inappropriate activity committed by the Democratic vice presidential candidate during his earlier career," an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday.

"Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to win because he knows Trump will roll over and give him anything he wants. We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections," said Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign.

Despite status pages not showing any issues, I'm seeing serious lag in federation I think. Checked both on mobile (Voyager for iOS and web) and when compared to viewing via web on other instances (namely Lemmy.world), posts and comments for the last day seem to be missing?

“He’s doing a good job,” Trump saidabout the Israeli leader. “Biden is trying to hold him back, just so you understand, Biden is more superior to the VP. He’s trying to hold him back, and he probably should be doing the opposite, actually. I’m glad that Netanyahu decided to do what he had to do, but it’s moving along pretty good.”

The now-missing account, which posted under the name Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.

“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.

I’m torn. Both Galadriel and Sauron say the other is a threat to Middle-earth. One has to be wrong, so whom am I to trust? Should I trust the Dark Lord who attempted to topple the White City of Gondor, dominate all life, and attempt to stay in power for eternity? Or do I trust the Elf Queen representing the coalition of Men and Elves who defeated Sauron when he tried to enslave the Free Peoples… but could maybe do more meet-and-greets?