Tag: US Congress

Time To Eliminate The Congressional Gerontocracy

Gerontocracy? Yep the rule by old farts.

I have a pet peeve, I know I have many, but this one is paramount in our government….it is time for the reform of Congress to begin and please start with the amount of old farts that stumble through the governing process.

Let’s look at today’s Congress just a few things….Pelosi age 84 falls and has to have a hip replacement, then there is the head GOPer in the Senate, McConnell age 82,  who over the last few years has fallen multiple times that last time in messed up his wrist and now we have a sitting Representative that is in a care home….let’s not forget about the senile old fart that was over 100 years old and still serving in Congress…..

Concerns that elected officials in Congress are too old resurfaced over the weekend following news that retiring U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, 81, has been residing at a senior living facility, according to her son. Granger has not cast a vote since July.

On Friday, the outlet The Dallas Express published an investigation into Granger’s whereabouts, reporting that Granger (R-Texas) is currently living at Tradition Senior Living in Fort Worth, which provides memory care services. Granger’s son, Brandon Granger, said that his mother is not in the memory care facility, but he said she does reside at Tradition Senior Living, according to The Dallas Morning News. The outlet also reported that her son said she has been “having some dementia issues late in the year.”

Reacting to the news on Sunday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote: “Kay Granger’s long absence reveals the problem with a Congress that rewards seniority & relationships more than merit & ideas. We have a sclerotic gerontocracy.”

“American gerontocracy, on both sides of the political aisle, is an absolute embarrassment,” wrote the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Saturday.

The journalist Ken Klippenstein echoed these remarks. In a post on Bluesky he argued it shouldn’t be taboo for the media to point out when elected officials appear to be impaired by age. “Part of why the gerontocracy exists is because the news media is so squeamish about calling this stuff out,” he wrote.

According to a breakdown from The Washington Post in 2023, the median age in Congress has been trending upward in recent decades. Last year, 48% of all members of Congress were Baby Boomers, and 19 lawmakers elected to the 118th Congress are members of the Silent Generation, meaning they were born at some point between 1928 and 1945.

After the 2024 presidential race, during which President Joe Biden stepped down as the presumptive Democratic nominee following a disastrous debate performance that sparked widespread concerns that he was not fit to run, there was some reshuffling of the Democratic leadership on congressional committees which saw younger lawmakers take over. However, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), 35, was unsuccessful in her bid to be the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. She was bested by 74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.)

Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer indicated that the thinking that drove some members to favor Connolly is also what was behind Democrats’ loss of the White House on November 5.

“Valuing seniority over political and messaging chops is exactly how Democrats got into this mess in the first place,” he wrote on X in mid-December.

(commondreams.org)

Time for this to be addressed……even the presidency is full of old farts with lots of backward thinking….this country needs forward thinkers not old farts grasping at the past.

Anything to add?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Lawmakers Are $113 Million Richer

Some US lawmakers made some cash off these wars and such….for me that is insider trading but that is not thew way the courts see it.

Take a look….

Dozens of U.S. lawmakers and their families bought or sold up to $113 million worth of shares in top Pentagon contractors this year, an analysis published on Wednesday revealed.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft found that at least 37 members of Congress and their relatives traded between $24-113 million worth of stock in companies listed on Defense and Security Monitor’s Top 100 Defense Contractors index.

As the Quincy Institute noted: “Eight of these members even simultaneously held positions on the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, the committees overseeing defense policy and foreign relations. Members of Congress that oversee the annual defense bill and are privy to intelligence briefings have an upper hand in predicting future stock prices.”

The analysis found that one Democratic congressman accounted for the vast bulk of defense stock trading in 2024.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey traded at least $22 million and as much as $104 million worth of shares in companies on the index, including Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, and IBM. Gottheimer—who said his trades are handled by a third-party firm—sits on both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the National Security subcommittee of the Committee on Financial Services.

Next on the list in distant second place is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has defended stock trading by lawmakers, and according to Quincy, “sold over $1 million worth of Microsoft stock in late July.”

“The timing of Pelosi’s Microsoft trades in the past have garnered attention, too; in March 2021, she bought Microsoft call options less than two weeks before the Army announced a $22 billion contract with the software company to supply augmented reality headsets,” the analysis states.

“Pelosi had the most profitable 2024 of any lawmaker, netting an estimated $38.6 million from all stock trading activity, according to Quiver Quantitative,” the report adds.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/congress-defense-stock-trading

History should dictate that the GOP lawmakers should be the richest traders…..but this time it is some of the top Dems that profited from their knowledge.There needs to be some reform on this…..but not today…..that will be a later Congress to do the right thing.

I know that was my joke for the day.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

It’s That Time Again!

Time for one of the silliest games in DC….the spending bill and the looming government shutdown.

Theater of the Absurd at it’s best.

That time again when there is no spending bill and the government is only hours away from a shutdown….like I said a silly game that is truly sad.

There was a bill but Trump and his band of misfits peed on it.

The bipartisan spending bill Congress put forward to prevent a government shutdown is dead, according to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who responded “yes” when asked Wednesday night if the deal had been officially scrapped following President-elect Trump’s rejection of it. House Speaker Mike Johnson has not yet said how he plans to proceed, the BBC reports. Rather than passing a budget for the fiscal year that started October 1, Congress passed a temporary spending bill, which expires Friday. Without a short-term funding bill passing, a federal government shutdown looms.

  • “There’s still a lot of negotiations and conversations going on,” and no clear path forward yet, Scalise told reporters, per the New York Post, which refers to the rejected bipartisan stopgap bill as “bloated” at 1,547 pages. Trump has called for it to be streamlined.
  • Elon Musk, who had also spoken out aggressively against the bill, posted victoriously after news broke that it had been killed. “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed.”
  • Trump and VP-elect Vance are also calling for the national debt ceiling to be raised; asked whether that’s on the table for the revised stopgap measure, Scalise would only say, “We’re obviously looking at a lot of options.”
  • The Hill reports lawmakers on both sides seemed to be “caught off guard” by the debt limit increase demand. Politico reports it’s a “complicated issue lawmakers hadn’t planned to deal with for months,” and there’s quite a bit of concern that it can’t be dealt with in a matter of days.
  • Before the deal’s collapse, Johnson went on Fox and Friends to talk about it Wednesday morning, and revealed that he’s on a group text with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and that he’d been texting with them about the background of the deal the night prior, NBC News reports.
  • He said he reminded them that with the thin margin Republicans have in the House, Democrat votes are needed, but apparently they (and Trump, and Vance) were unconvinced; as the Washington Post explains, critics of the bill claim it contains too many “giveaways to Democrats.”
  • Sources tell Politico and the Hill Johnson is now considering a “clean” continuing resolution as a Plan B, meaning additional provisions such as disaster aid and financial assistance for farmers would be dropped from the spending bill and considered again in the new year. It’s unclear Democrats, or even all of the House’s conservative lawmakers, would support such a move.

It is the same song and dance every time….and then the idiots come to a last minute deal to save the shutdown….but with Trump and the Boyz in the wings will they come top a deal?

Let’s look at the dark cloud….

President-elect Trump abruptly rejected a bipartisan plan Wednesday to prevent a Christmastime government shutdown, instead telling House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans to essentially renegotiate—days before a deadline when federal funding runs out.

  • Trump’s sudden decision to make new demands sent Congress spiraling as lawmakers are trying to wrap up work and head home for the holidays, the AP reports. It leaves House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling to salvage a new plan, days before Friday’s deadline to keep the government open. “Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH,” Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance said in a statement.
  • The president-elect offered a proposal for a continuation of government funding along with a much more controversial provision to raise the nation’s debt limit—something his own party routinely rejects.
  • Democrats decried the GOP revolt over the stopgap measure to keep federal offices running. “House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government,” said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “And hurt the working-class Americans they claim to support. You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow.”
  • Already, the bill was on the verge of collapse, as hard-right conservatives and Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk rejected the plan. Rank-and-file lawmakers decried the massive 1,500-page bill over its increased spending—which includes their first pay raises in more than a decade. A number of Republicans were waiting for Trump to signal whether they should vote yes or no.
  • “This should not pass,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. He warned that “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”
  • Sources tell the Hill that Johnson is looking at a “Plan B” involving a “clean” resolution that would continue funding the government while dropping provisions including $10 billion in aid for farmers and $100 billion in disaster relief.
  • The stopgap measure is needed because Congress has failed to pass its annual appropriations bills to fund all the various agencies in the federal government, from the Pentagon and national security apparatus, to the health, welfare, transportation, and other routine domestic services. When the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, Congress simply punted the problem by passing a temporary funding bill that expires Friday

This sad saga gets more ridiculous by the session.

I cannot wait for the rest of the story.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Why So Many Wars?

Many people if they thought about it would want to know just why we are involved in so many conflicts around the planet.

Here’s a hint….Money!

You see war and such are supposed to be decided by the Congress but after 9/11 they took a back seat to the president who decides which proxy war we will fund.

The Congress is content to sit on the sidelines and invest in the companies that supply these wars.

Just take a look at who along with their family members are profiting from our involvement in these conflicts….

This page writes frequently about Congress’s unofficial but all-too-real mandate of making money for its friends in the defense sector. While this is absolutely true, it is also crucial to remember that these lawmakers also use the weapons industry to enrich themselves.

According to a comprehensive breakdown compiled by Sludge, more than 50 members of Congress hold as much as $10.9 million in defense contractor stocks. The publication calculated the figure by using a variety of financial disclosures currently required by law. As the article notes, these securities are held either by the lawmakers, their spouses or children, or via a qualified blind trust.  

The halls of American power ooze with all kinds of unsavory activity, but this is undoubtedly one of the system’s most egregious forms of corruption. Members of Congress who sit on influential bodies that control the flow of federal dollars to some of the nation’s largest weapons manufacturers are directly invested in these same companies, to the tune of hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars.

“In the Senate, several lawmakers with investments in defense contractors sit on committees that set and approve defense spending: three are on the Committee on Armed Services (SASC), and five are members of the Committee on Appropriations, including two who sit on the key Defense Appropriations subcommittee. This body has jurisdiction over drafting legislation to allocate funds to government agencies including the Department of Defense, as well as supplemental spending bills,” writes Sludge. “On the House side, at least five lawmakers with household stakes in defense contractors sit on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), which has jurisdiction over defense policy, headlined by the mammoth annual NDAA. Three of the representatives sit on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.”  

https://issuechronicle.substack.com/p/the-house-and-senate-members-personally

If you do as advised and ‘follow the money’ you will see the true reason why so many wars.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

A Conflict Of Interests

It is no secret the way I feel that there are too people making profits off of our total involvement in most of the world’s conflicts.

First there are all those lobbying firms from K Street but what about the Congress?

At least 50 U.S. lawmakers or members of their households are financially invested in companies that make military weapons and equipment—even as these firms “receive hundreds of billions of dollars annually from congressionally-crafted Pentagon appropriations legislation,” a report published Thursday revealed.

Sludge‘s David Moore analyzed 2023 financial disclosures and stock trades disclosed in other reports and found that “the total value of the federal lawmakers’ defense contractors stock holdings could be as much as $10.9 million.”

According to the report:

The spouse of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, holds between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in each of Boeing and RTX, as well as holdings in two other defense manufacturers. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), another Defense Appropriations subcommittee member, holds up to $50,000 in the stock of Boeing, which received nearly $33 billion in defense contracts last year. On the Democratic side of the aisle, Sen. John Hickenlooper (Colo.) holds up to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of stock in RTX…

The most widely held defense contractor stock among senators and representatives is Honeywell, an American company that makes sensors and guiding devices that are being used by the Israeli military in its airstrikes in Gaza. The second most commonly held defense stock by Congress is RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome, among other weapons systems.

All 13 senators whose households disclosed military stock holdings voted for the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, which, as Common Dreams reported, allocated a record $886.3 billion for the U.S. military while many lawmakers’ constituents struggled to meet their basic needs.

“It is an obvious conflict of interest when a member of Congress owns significant stock investments in a company and then votes to award the same company lucrative federal contracts,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, told Sludge.

“Whether or not the official action is taken for actual self-enrichment purposes is beside the point. There is at least an appearance of self-enrichment and that appearance is just as damaging to the integrity of Congress,” Holman added. “This type of conflict of interest is already banned for executive branch officials and so should be for Congress as well. The ETHICS Act would justly avoid that conflict of interest by prohibiting members of Congress and their spouses from owning stock investments altogether.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/members-of-congress-who-own-defense-stock?

A definite conflict of interests and yet life goes on like they are just fulfilling their job.

No one should be surprised just look at others in Congress that have the inside tract to money making opportunities that the rest of us do not have….like Pelosi, et al.

But not to worry these people will not do much to rein in their corruption…so they can make the obscene profits from continuing our funding and supplying of conflicts around the world.

It is good to be in Congress.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Fly American!

No this is not some diatribe about American Airlines…..but rather a flag post.

It seems that the flag you fly in the front yard may not be American at all and the Congress wants to do something about that….

Soon, Old Glory will have to be born in the land of the free and not merely flying over it. Congress has passed a proposal to require the federal government to purchase only American flags that have been completely manufactured in the US. The US imports millions of American flags from overseas, mostly from China, and the sponsors of the proposal said it’s time for American flags to originate in the country they represent, the AP reports.

  • Supporters of the proposal, led by Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, said the change is more than just symbolic—they believe it will support American jobs and manufacturers while preserving the nation’s most recognized banner.
  • The American flag serves as a symbol of our identity, resolve, and values as one people. To honor its significance, the federal government should only use flags entirely manufactured in the United States,” Collins said.
  • Supporters of the proposal said Monday that they expect the measure to be signed into law soon. It was sent to President Biden on Thursday.
  • Federal rules currently require the government to buy flags that contain half US-made materials, supporters of the proposal said. The rule change, called the All-American Flag Act, requires government-purchased flags to be produced entirely with American-made materials as well as manufactured in the US.
  • The value of US flag imports in 2015 was well over $4 million, according to federal data. The vast majority of those imports came from China, supporters of the rule change said. In 2017, the US imported some 10 million American flags, and 99.5% of them came from China, supporters of the proposal said. Those figures include all American flags imported into the country and not just those purchased by the federal government.
  • Collins and Brown have been pushing for American flags to be manufactured in the US for several years. Previous efforts to change the rules to require US-made flags found success in the Senate but stalled when they reached the House of Representatives. The bill finally passed in the House last week.

How gracious of them to do this for the country.

But I believe there are many more problems that need attention….hunger, prices, housing pop in mind….but they do something this lame that could probably be done with an Executive Order.

So if you are flying an American flag made in China can you claim to be all that patriotic?

This effort is a waste of energy and time….but that is what Congress does best.

Anything?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Tax Cuts And Jobs Permanency Act

An old con returns!

Fancy name for a con job that is over 40 years old….and still effective, believe it or not.

The title is a fancy name for the old BS of trickle down economics or Voodoo economics if you prefer.

I have been watching this con for decades that started with lover boy Reagan….just a reminder from 16 years ago….

The Humor That Is Trickle Down Economics

And now with an election looming we are hit with the con yet again….

They’re at it again. And it’s not even original: The trickle-down economics that two-dozen Republican governors and former U.S. President Donald Trump are reviving as you read these words has a long history.

“Trickle down,” of course, was the theory advanced by former President Ronald Reagan that if America only made rich people massively richer with staggering tax cuts, ending anti-trust regulation, and government subsidies for their industries, they would use all that extra free money to build new factories, hire people, and the abundance would trickle down to the average worker.

It was a lie, but it wasn’t the first time the GOP had tried that lie. Then knew exactly what they were doing, and what outcome it would produce. Instead of raising the pay of their workers, the rich people on the receiving end of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts simply added the cash to their money bins and investments, bought new yachts or trophy wives, and blasted themselves into outer space on penis-shaped rockets.

Nonetheless, Republican politicians think we haven’t noticed and they’re trying to pull it off again at both the state and federal level. A bill with 102 GOP co-sponsors (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Permanency Act) is in motion in the House of Representatives right now to double-down on Trump’s tax cuts.

How did we get here, and why are they still pushing something that’s so discredited it’s become a punch-line for late-night comedians?

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gop-trickle-down-scam

The more ignorant among us will believe the trickle down con no matter what fancy name they assign to the bill.  They say Americans are wising up to the con…..I ask are they really?

Experience says they are not.

May I suggest that you pay closer attention to what will be your money and less to some smiling con man that tells you everything you want to hear.

One cannot feed or house loved ones on words.

Pay Attention!

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Contraception–Yes Or No?

WE know from the news that the GOP wants to take and some cases already has the right of choice from the people. The battle now is over contraception and the Dems have an attempt to protect access to this form of birth control.

Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic measure Wednesday to codify a federal right to contraception access. The bill would have prevented states from enacting legislation to limit access to forms of contraception including hormonal birth control and intrauterine devices, the Washington Post reports. Many Republicans called the bill unnecessary and government overreach; Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins of Maine were the only members of their party to vote to advance the measure. Every Democrat supported it.

“This should be an easy vote,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray said before the count, per the New York Times. “It almost shouldn’t be necessary.” But Democrats were maneuvering to put Republicans on the record on reproductive rights, an issue on which the GOP stance is unpopular with voters. In vitro fertilization may be put to a vote next week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote. “I expect we will see a lot more show votes this summer,” GOP Sen. John Thune had said Tuesday, per the AP. On Wednesday, Schumer countered that: “Today was not a show vote. This was a ‘show us who you are’ vote, and Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”

The Democratic effort to codify the right began when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago; Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion said the right to contraception is another issue the court should reconsider. Republicans have opposed the effort while saying they support access to contraception, per the Times. Schumer could bring the Right to Contraception Act up for a vote again later.

This in my opinion is a little late….it should have been waiting for the SCOTUS ruling….but better late than never I guess.

Since the GOP is so concerned wirth women’s right of choice what will they make out of the news about men?

A novel birth control option for men, as easy as applying lotion once per day, appears to be effective within weeks with minimal side effects to boot, according to new research. NES/T, a hormonal solution to block sperm production, is applied to the shoulders once per day. One of 222 participants in a phase 2 trial tells NBC News the gel solution felt much like hand sanitizer. Applying it was “such an easy process,” the man says, adding the only possible side effects he experienced were acne and minor weight gain. In terms of participants’ sperm counts, 20% were sufficiently suppressed within five weeks, 52% by eight weeks, 62% by nine weeks, and 86% after 15 weeks, according to data presented Sunday at the Endocrine Society’s conference in Boston, per Gizmodo.

Developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s Contraceptive Development Program, NES/T gets its name from its two main ingredients: nestorone and testosterone. Nestorone, a synthetic version of progesterone, lowers the levels of hormones responsible for fertility, including testosterone, in the blood and testes. Since this may reduce a man’s sex drive, testosterone is added to the gel “to maintain stable hormone levels in men’s blood, ensuring temporary sterility and minimizing side effects,” per Gizmodo. “We’re pretty pleased with the limited side effects that we have observed,” Diana Blithe, chief of the NICHD’s Contraceptive Development Program, tells the outlet. She was also pleasantly surprised to see sperm counts fall so quickly.

Researchers consider suppression effective for contraception to be no more than 1 million sperm per millimeter of semen, down from 15 million to 200 million per milliliter, per NBC. The median suppression time was eight weeks. But as many participants weren’t checked between weeks four and eight, the true median might be lower. “We’re really pleased with this result. And we think it will make the gel more attractive to people who maybe didn’t want to wait three months for it to reach its effectiveness,” Blithe tells Gizmodo. The research team has since launched a Phase 2B trial involving 400 men, with encouraging preliminary results, ahead of plans for a Phase 3 trial, to be discussed with the FDA next year. If all goes well, the gel could hit the market by the end of the decade, the BBC reports.

Will the GOP try to control men’s sex lives as they are doing with women?

Just wondering.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Assault On Free Speech

The country and most of the world is voicing its disapproval of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza….protests have erupted all over the US mostly lead by university students and it has begun to spill over in the general public (shades of the 60s and 70s).

Congress has taken up these protests by making it against federal statues to voice an opinion or carry out a boycott….in other words they are trying to silence the voices of dissension.

What is driving this assault on free speech?

It should be no surprise that so much of the Congress’s attention in recent months has been devoted to the alleged dangers of people saying things and reading things. The foreign policy establishment in the US has been increasingly pushing for ever more US involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East while agitating for a new Cold War with China. As war fervor spreads, freedom always fades. 

Fortunately, there is growing voter opposition to US involvement in these active war zones, and regime agents have been unable to whip the taxpayers into a paranoid hysteria with the ease of decades past. The old bipartisan consensus supporting whatever new war the regime cooked up appears to be disappearing. Support for various wars is now a highly partisan issue. For example, a majority of polled Republicans say the US regime gives “too much” aid to Ukraine, and there is an active faction of Republicans in the Congress opposed to ongoing US involvement in that ten-year-old dispute. Meanwhile, support for the State of Israel’s mass-murder campaign in Gaza is in free-fall among Democrats. According to Gallup, 75 percent of Democrats oppose Tel Aviv’s current military campaign. (Notably, 60 percent of “independents” also oppose Israel’s war in Gaza.)

From the perspective of the neoconservatives and other foreign-policy “elites” in Washington, this is all awful news, and something must be done. That “something” turns out to be attacks on freedom of speech and independent media. Apparently, it is not enough that the federal government collude with social media corporations to fight “disinformation” and other opinions not approved by the regime. It is also “necessary” that the War Party insert into federal law new presidential powers over media outlets. 

https://mises.org/mises-wire/war-hysteria-fuels-new-attacks-free-speech

Making it an offense to criticize Israel is just BS….the criticism can be stated without it being linked to religion….but that matters not when AIPAC is paying these slugs in DC to protect them from criticism.

I will not be silenced….you do what you like but until Israel starts acting like a responsible nation then I shall continue my writings.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Why No Outrage?

How many times have you heard about Russia or China using trolls to influence everything from elections to phone carriers?

It is disgusting that cyber attacks go on a cowards way of dealing with controversy.

And yet when it comes to these attacks by Israel absolutely no one with the exception of NYTimes has nothing to say…..why is that?

Israel has spent millions on a covert and still-active influence campaign targeting the US public and lawmakers in an effort to boost support for its war in Gaza, according to reporting by the New York Times. Commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the $2 million campaign allegedly involved Tel Aviv political marketing firm Stoic and dozens of tech startups, which were tasked with spreading pro-Israel messages. Starting in October, hundreds of fake accounts across X, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit began trying to rally support for the war in the US and Canada while dismissing claims of human rights abuses. The accounts were made to appear as if they were controlled by North Americans when, in fact, they were linked to Israel’s own government.

Public support for Israel’s war in Gaza has been falling steadily with reports of widespread bombing and civilian deaths. The operation, “the first documented case of the Israeli government’s organizing a campaign to influence the US government,” shows “the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion,” per the Times. It was an “irresponsible, reckless, and anti-democratic act,” says Achiya Schatz, executive director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that first identified the campaign in March, per Politico. At least 128 members of Congress were targeted, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Politico reports, citing data from FakeReporter.

FakeReporter found the campaign had limited reach, with fake accounts gaining more than 40,000 followers. In a statement last week announcing it had disrupted the effort, Meta also claimed the campaign hadn’t reached a large audience. Many of the posts were crafted using ChatGPT. Some referred to antisemitism on college campuses and suggested Jewish people were being persecuted. Some included Islamophobic content, per Haaretz. The statement “I gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information” appeared across 118 posts. Some linked to fake news sites that shared material to promote Israel’s stance on the war, the Times reports. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has denied involvement.

(I must be doing something right for have one of these bastard trolls that comes to IST….he goes to Spam but he still tries to sneak in from time to time)

Interference in our government and we just shrug it off……why is that?

I realize that cyber attacks are common place these days….but if we are gonna go off and sanction or whatever lame ass response against say Russia or China why is Israel exempt?

We get butt hurt when other nations interfere in our elections and such then why do we turn a blind eye to Israel doing the very thing that we condemn others of doing?

Now we see who controls Congress and the Executive office…..don’t we?

I have About had enough of this preferential treatment Israel gets…..time to reassess our relationship with this country.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”