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Professional curmudgeon Michael Kinsley dropped in on the pages of the New York Times Sunday Review to ask its readers to point out positive things that President Trump has said or done. He offers this: “Donald Trump tweets….Thanks to @realDonaldtrump, the average citizen now has a view straight into the president’s id. You may not like what you see, but you can see it.” (After this weekend, I can say this one positive thing about President Trump: He boycotted the White House Correspondents Dinner.)
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The number of people who engage with Trump’s tweets “has gradually declined” over the first hundred days of his presidency, the AP’s Jonathan Lemire and Maureen Linke report.
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Regarding Trump’s tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tells Steven Levy “I think it’s really important that we maintain open channels to our leaders, whether we like what they’re saying or not, because I don’t know of another way to hold them accountable.” Dorsey also admits that while Twitter wants to do more to reduce harassment of women and others on the platform, it has so far made little progress toward that goal.
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In an alternative universe, Chelsea Clinton, the unpaid assistant to her mother the President, appeared in an ad for the new Clinton Tower in Manila, a project her family’s foundation is backing, while at the same time President Hillary Clinton invited Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House after a “very friendly” conversation, despite Duterte’s massive campaign of extrajudicial killings of drug suspects.
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Fresh off a narrow referendum victory (which President Trump congratulated him for), Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fired nearly 4,000 public officials and banned Wikipedia, Patrick Kingsley reports for The New York Times. Wikipedia had refused to remove content that the Turkish government found offensive.
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Speaking of cracking down on free speech, White House chief of staff Reince Preibus said Sunday that the administration is looking at making it possible for the president to sue news organizations for stories he doesn’t like, which as Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo points out, basically means amending the First Amendment.
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Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who has made no secret of his desire to suppress legal public political protests, is being considered for a position at the Department of Homeland Security, Andrew Restuccia, Josh Dawsey, and Daniel Lippman report for Politico. The job, assistant secretary at the Office of Partnership and Engagement, coordinates outreach to state, local and tribal law enforcement, and does not require Senate approval.
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The EPA is taking down websites that provided detailed information on climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin report for The Washington Post. “As EPA renews its commitment to human health and clean air, land, and water, our website needs to reflect the views of the leadership of the agency,” J.P. Freire, the agency’s associate administrator for public affairs, said in a statement.
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Opposition watch: The staff of Slate came up with a list of 80 people and organizations that have kept Trump in check so far. It’s not a bad list, but leaves out the people who led the airport protests; GrabYourWallet (which along with listed group Sleeping Angels has built the consumer boycotts challenging the Trump business brand); Run for Something and Vote Run Lead (which along with listed group Emily’s List have built a massive pool of prospective candidates); and long-running organizing hubs like MoveOn, Color of Change, and the Working Families Party, which have all quietly provided a great deal of backbone to new groups coming out of the Womens March and Indivisible.
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Whose internet is it? FCC chairman Ajit Pai says he wants to get rid of net neutrality to help small-town Americans, but as Susan Crawford explains in Backchannel, those are the folks who are most being hurt by cable monopolies.
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Verizon and AT&T each launched new service offerings this week that Yahoo Finance’s Jeff Dunn says are highly deceptive. “There’s a certain type of language we’ve come to expect from carriers and internet service providers over the years. Actual words are tossed into a blender; they come out meaning half of what they really do; and the rest of the definitions are tucked away in fine print at the bottom of the page.” He says that’s true not just for the data rates they promise, but also for how they handle customer privacy.
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Minority Report, here we come: Taser, the world’s largest police body camera vendor, envisions using all the raw data collected on those devices to help police departments anticipate criminal activity, Ava Kofman reports for The Intercept.
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Life in Facebookistan: A leaked 23-page document from inside Facebook shows how the company offers advertisers the ability to target vulnerable teens based on its ability to understand their emotional states, Sam Machkovech reports for ArsTechnica. He writes, “the selling point of this 2017 document is that Facebook’s algorithms can determine, and allow advertisers to pinpoint, ‘moments when young people need a confidence boost’….the documents also reveal a particular interest in helping advertisers target moments in which young users are interested in ‘looking good and body confidence’ or ‘working out and losing weight.’ Another section describes how image-recognition tools are used on both Facebook and Instagram (a wholly owned Facebook subsidiary) to reveal to advertisers ‘how people visually represent moments such as meal times.'”
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This is civic tech: Mexico City’s new constitution was developed in part by using crowdsourcing, with citizens submitting online petitions to suggest provisions, Sandra Weiss reports for the Journal of International Politics and Society. “A committee of legal experts, academics, politicians and activists drafted the document and a second committee decided which petitions to accept,” she writes.
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A group of veterans of the Obama Administration have launched Civic Advisors, its founder Kyle Lierman writes on Medium. It’s a “social impact strategy and consulting firm,” which he explains means, “We are going to help good people trying to do good things get shit done.” How? “We will help our clients with a full slate of services including strategic engagement & communications, advocacy campaign strategy & management, digital strategy development & management, video production, corporate social responsibility strategy & management, event strategy & design, business development, executive coaching & media training, impact evaluation, and speechwriting.”
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Jonathan Smucker’s new book, Hegemony How To, gets a rave review from Sam Adler-Bell in The New Republic. We’ll be hosting Smucker for a book talk at Civic Hall May 15, and he’ll be one of the many great speakers keynoting Personal Democracy Forum June 8-9. And speaking of book reviews and talks, don’t miss David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy, speaking on his new book The Givers, this Tuesday night at Civic Hall, along with Ami Dar and Allison Fine. The Times Book Review called the book “engaging, though-provoking.”
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