Not likely. Fetterman has two huge issues that pull him towards MAGA: a) tons of MAGA voters he must appease, and b) the stroke that messed up his brain.

They just announced they were upping the ad content. You are seeing it in real time.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/business/movies-theaters-ads-amc.html
• https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/amc-theatres-commercials-1236256062/
• https://deadline.com/2025/06/amc-responds-more-commercials-1236423804/

When I hear ‘government bloat’, I think $500 hammers and fat cat contracts where big companies get huge contracts that mostly go in the pockets of a handful of rich owners while little goes to the actual project.

I do NOT think it means randomly removing workers. Salaries cost little and are the support structure of the government. I might not want to buy a ‘bridge to nowhere’ but I certainly don’t want to take out 10% of the supports on each bridge.

Everything DOGE has done seems destructive and none of it seems to reduce government waste. In fact, the opposite. p.s. I know there’s more to the hammer story, but – like transgendered instead of transgenic mice – the public mostly only heard the price tag.

The vast army of Georgia poll workers report for duty only about three days a year and get paid about $7.25 an hour. Every time we come in, the rules have changed, so we train for eight hours to learn the new protocols. Election day itself, including set-up and break-down, starts at 5:30 am and ends at 9:00 pm, two hours later if you’re a manager delivering the ballots to the regional office. Most of us are retired, and many are elderly (read: not tech-forward).

And poll workers are not perfect. One of them puts on a sweater and inadvertently obscures her name tag (not allowed). Another shows a new person how to work the check-in station (not allowed). Another tells a nonprofit they can set up their food hand-outs inside the building so as to stay out of the rain (not allowed). And at some point during the 15 hour work day, all of you find yourself accidentally socializing with one another (also not allowed). Likewise, the clerks are socializing with the voters (you guessed it: not allowed), which, worst case, is akin to being smothered in grandmas.

This sounds very like my experience back when I used to work the polls. We all did the best we could and we all knew a fair chunk of the voters, so chatting was frequent.

I’m going to be repeating this whenever this ad blitz is mentioned because it is MUCH WORSE than you think. America PAC is partially funded by Musk and his old pals at Palantir. They sell data and analyses of it. You might get registered to vote if your state is a solid red or blue, but CNBC reports (archive):

[…] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Again, Palantir sells information, so in all likelihood they are going to take that input to figure out exactly how to target people to ‘vote Trump’ using the very information the public gave them for free!

Look, I don’t know if JD Vance had sex with a couch. I don’t even know if JD Vance had sex with couch cushions. But yes, I’ve heard that JD Vance did not WRITE that he had sex with a couch in his book. I don’t know if JD Vance wrote he had sex with a couch somewhere else, though.

John Oliver called Vance’s staff to ask and they hung up on Oliver, which was reported as ‘not a “no”’, so I had been thinking, ‘ya know? maybe that JD Vance guy really is a couchfucker, who knows?’ But here you’re saying he’s denied it? Or partially denied it? Well I don’t know what to think now, but I guess it is safer to presume JD Vance having sex with a couch is probably more legend than fact. Certainly, JD Vance having sex with a couch isn’t something you’d want to discuss in polite society or political debate because we’ve no proof and a possible denial.

The premise is suspect.

First, there are lots of (mostly) monogamous animals (‘cheating’ in monogamous pair bonds gets a fair amount of study).

Second, which gorillas? Are you talking about the ones that form alliances with several males and maintain friendly relationships, groom one another, and fight together against common enemies?

Third, monogamy (even with cheating) seems to have an advantage for species where females forage on their own rather than in groups/herds. There’s more to it, though.

This is from a pre-print study, so should be viewed with some suspicion, but it at least describes the current state of investigations:

Since phylogenetic inertia is not a realistic explanation given that four very distantly related lineages are monogamous, the implication is that monogamy has alternative fitness advantages for males. These benefits must also be advantageous for the female, otherwise she would be not willing to tolerate the male’s continued presence – and, perhaps more importantly, would not be willing to undergo the evolution of the expensive cognitive and behavioural traits associated with pairbonding (Dunbar & Shultz 2021).

the fact that primates, in particular, have a long period of offspring dependency suggests that the problem is more likely to be associated with offspring survival.

For human-specific stuff, here’s a piece on promiscuity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210680/

And one on the ideology of female ‘honor’ and predictors of who will feel what and how strongly : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10563489/

The U.S. uses sanctions all the damn time. Biden lifted SOME sanctions for a bit, then put them back and now there are calls for yet MORE sanctions. Sanctions all around! IMO, this hasn’t worked, won’t work, hurts the populace more than the leaders, leads to dangerous migrations that end up turning the U.S. more authoritarian as it freaks out about these refugees seeking relief from the policies the U.S. itself put in place, encourages a coalition of dictators who are all facing U.S. sanctions to trade with one another since we won’t trade with them, and is bad for so many more reasons.

From Washington Post (archive):

U.S. sanctions have surged in the past two decades and are in effect in some form in almost a third of all countries. In the case of Venezuela, U.S. officials were — and remain — sharply torn over the financial fusillade.

The Biden administration temporarily lifted key sanctions on Venezuela last year in exchange for promises from Maduro to allow a competitive presidential election, … But because Maduro has failed to follow through on most of his commitments, the Biden administration reimposed the sanctions.

If you prefer Al Jazeera:

Since 2014, output has contracted by 70 percent, more than twice the hit the United States suffered during the Great Depression…Over that period, some 7.7 million Venezuelans – a quarter of the population – have left the country in search of work.

Biden inherited a strategy of maximum pressure on Venezuela from President Trump. But despite applied pressure, consecutive rounds of sanctions failed to dislodge Maduro.

Biden, meanwhile, pursued a different approach. Under the 2023 Barbados Agreement, he eased some sanctions – notably on oil and debt – for political guarantees, namely free and fair elections and the release of detained US citizens.

The deal allowed Venezuela to earn an additional $740m in oil sales from last October to March. But after Maduro blocked Machado from running, and following the revival of a territorial dispute with Guyana, Biden re-imposed US sanctions in April.

Quick Post election status: https://www.axios.com/2024/07/30/biden-gop-sanction-venezuela-election-maduro

Congressional Republicans are pressing the Biden administration to impose harsh sanctions on Venezuela’s government for allegedly “subverting” the results of the country’s presidential election on Sunday.

Decades ago, before the internet, when your local radio stations and newspapers paid for service to a special machine that constantly churned out stories from stringers and main branches, there was a saying that I no longer remember but went something like, “Associated Press gets the story first; United Press gets it right.”

We never doubted that AP/UP/Reu/(etc.) were feeding most the news. The sources were right there in print.

It is good to remind people that while there are an endless number of websites, most news still comes from a handful of sources. I will even agree that our sources are all biased.

That said there are some stories where bias should be expected; where there aren’t really two sides. Example: “Locals outraged by villian’s kicking puppies!” Good reporting might include the reasoning, but the public is not going to side with the puppy-kicker. Surely there was a better way to handle the situation before it got to that.

The public does not side with Hitler, either. Personally, I am thankful that the larger public has been ‘brainwashed’ into thinking Hitler was ‘bad’. It saddens me that there are Nazis (or neo-Nazis) in countries that fought to end that vile cause. The citizenry should know better. More than that, the citizenry should know that all autocrats are bad. Any benevolent dictator is still mortal and will cede the position to someone else, and it won’t be long before the ‘someone else’ is not benevolent.

So: thank you for posting the link reminding everyone to be critical of all news sources, but also remember that some things are fairly reported. Sometimes a point of view is valid. Sometimes there is an actual solid truth that is being told. Yes, sometimes that truth is getting sensationalized, but that doesn’t it make it less true.

For this particular case, I will re-iterate that I am worried about potential strife. If my family was living in Venezuela, I would want a stable and well funded government without corruption and without dictatorship. I don’t think the people had that as a ballot option, and I don’t trust any of the players. I do miss Chavez, though. The U.S. gave him a raw deal.

I just love it when someone posts propaganda and then goes into their own thread attempting to discredit everyone else as propaganda.

I’m anticipating strife and reporting from additional sources. This could get ugly and people should be aware of it.

Note that al-jazeera itself reported this in the article you linked:

“Everything we have seen so far indicates the results of the government are just produced,” Phil Gunson, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Venezuela, told Al Jazeera. He claimed the tallies announced by the government-controlled electoral authority did not correspond to the votes cast.

“The result that the opposition claims is the correct one … corresponds very closely to what opinion polls have been saying for the last several months,” Gunson said. “All the partial results we have seen so far indicate the opposition got something like three-fifths of the vote.”

Maybe. APnews says:

Authorities delayed releasing the results from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering attempts to verify the results.

After finally claiming to have won, Maduro accused unidentified foreign enemies of trying to hack the voting system.

Per bbc:

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among those expressing his scepticism after the result was announced by the National Electoral Council, a body which is dominated by government loyalists.

• The UK Foreign Office also expressed concern over the results

• The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, also said he found the result “hard to believe”.

• Uruguay’s president said of the Maduro government: “They were going to ‘win’ regardless of the actual results.”

• In a congratulatory message, President Vladimir Putin told Mr Maduro: “Remember, you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil.”

That said, I didn’t really want Maria Machado “—derided by the Chavista leadership for her pro-market views and her upper-class background“ — to lead a puppet government after getting kicked off the ballot.

The headline is false. There are authors of 2025 that may want to ban IVF and the like, but they did NOT put that into the text. Surrogacy is questionable. Given that it states that human life begins at conception, its call for ending ‘abortion drugs’ can immediately be presumed to include typical contraceptive pills (but probably not condoms).

From: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/jul/24/kamala-harris/fact-checking-kamala-harris-on-project-2025-limiti/

PolitiFact did not find any mention of IVF throughout the document, or specific recommendations to curtail the practice in the U.S. The manual doesn’t outright call for restricting standard contraceptive methods, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices, known as IUDs. Project 2025 pointed out the same.

However, it does recommend restricting some emergency contraceptives from certain no-cost insurance coverage.

Project 2025 DOES have this worrying language:

p. 450

From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.

p. 451

Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.

p. 457

Abortion Pills. Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.

It then goes on to detail how to end abortion pills. While the document specifically mentions mifepristone and misoprostol, the early language about life beginning at conception, it is not unreasonable to presume the practical end point might be ending birth control as well.

The U.S. admission followed a June 14 Reuters investigation that revealed how the Pentagon launched a secret psychological operation to discredit Chinese vaccines and other COVID aid in 2020 and 2021, at the height of the pandemic. As a result of the Reuters investigation, the Philippine Senate Foreign Relations Committee launched a hearing into the matter and sought a response from the U.S.

According to the June 25 document, Pentagon officials concluded its anti-vax campaign was “misaligned with our priorities.” It says the U.S. military told Filipino officials that operatives “ceased COVID-related messaging related to COVID-19 origins and COVID-19 vaccines in August 2021.”

… so Trump?

I imagine Biden had a lot of fires to put out once he became President in January 2021, but it would have been nice if this scheme ended sooner.

Everybody screenshot and archive that amazon page before they edit it!

Edit: I couldn’t archive.org to capture it, but this should work: https://archive.ph/pqXje

True, but I’d still rather infrastructure to be publicly held utilities. Energy suppliers are a strange case because any company can become part of the grid, but the power lines to our homes are generally controlled by one entity. I want at least that entity to be responsive to the public, but I also don’t want random suppliers taking down the grid.

I’m paranoid that if/when governments get in an argument, foreign infrastructure will either shut off or escalate pricing such that the public suffers (and yells at their local leaders to ‘do something!’).

Chinese-backed companies have distinct advantages over competitors in the U.S., such as heavily subsidized supply chains for raw polysilicon and unfinished solar modules, as well as low-cost government financing.

U.S.-based Convalt, for example, is struggling to bring online 10 GW of U.S. capacity at a factory it started building in upstate New York in 2022.

“If we are to succeed, we need American manufacturers like Convalt to survive this onslaught of low prices, to build factories with capacities that allow us to compete against the largest global firms, with Chinese beneficial ownership,” CEO Hari Achuthan said

This is one of the many reasons it is a bad idea to privatize utilities/infrastructure. That said, U.S. subsidies helped destroy economies across the globe (like Jamaica’s dairy farmers via world bank loan rules), so it is basically ‘fair play’ for China to play a similar game.

https://archive.is/MaxAY – thanks to mox@lemmy.sdf.org for the link

It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data.

Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.

Tell people 2025 would do this. No federal weather means local counties would have to pay Big Business for tornado/hurricane warnings. We’d pay more for fish because fishermen can’t get data unless they pay. Plane schedules become even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds.

Look: we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask people to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers – such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing “The Superbowl” unless you pay for a license. How’s any of that going to make things better?

P.S. This article is posted to several communities, so I’m reiterating this post repeatedly.