Tag: Biden

Opinion | The Co-dependency of Biden and Trump

[ad_1]

Trump’s best argument is that his policies were better than Biden’s. Biden’s best argument is that he’s not Trump.
It’s the weirdest, and most dispiriting, symbiotic relationship in politics. It’s the career politician soaked in conventional politics versus the upstart developer with zero respect for rules. The establishmentarian versus the populist. Boring versus erratic. And … unpopular versus unpopular, as well as, now that you mention it, old versus old.
If Biden stepped aside, Trump might feel a little less driven to run, whereas if Trump declined to run, Democrats would have to be a lot more nervous about how Biden would match up against a younger, less toxic GOP opponent.
As it is, the weakness of each is a motivator and prop for the other.
Just consider the latest news: It’s probably a good rule of thumb not to run a presidential candidate who’s under federal investigation for mishandling classified documents.
But does that rule still hold when your candidate could well be running against another candidate also under federal investigation for mishandling classified documents?
These are the imponderables that a potential Biden-Trump rematch presents.
Both can point fingers at the other for his respective lapses in storing classified documents, and try to argue, in effect, “Hey, your special-counsel investigation is much worse than my special-counsel investigation.”

Trump tucked into this argument in his characteristic fashion. In a Truth Social post, he mocked Biden for having classified documents “on the damp floor” of his “flimsy, unlocked, and unsecured” garage, whereas Mar-a-Lago is “a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place.” (Of course, Biden famously insisted that his garage was locked — he has a classic Corvette to protect, after all).
Biden’s team and allies have made the opposite case that, in contrast to Trump, his mistakes were inadvertent and immediately reported to authorities who could take the appropriate steps, whereas Trump resisted returning the files for months.
Regardless of the merits, there’s no doubt that Biden’s possession of classified documents materially assists Trump in his case; it might save him from indictment.
By the same token, Trump’s possession of classified documents materially assists Biden in his case; the discovery of the documents in Biden’s various unsecure locations may be a fiasco, but not one as drawn-out and legally fraught as the Mar-a-Lago drama.
It’s a little like both parties running candidates in the 1972 campaign who had authorized break-ins, or in a 1980 campaign who had presided over double-digit inflation.
Biden can lean on Trump in a similar fashion on all sort of other matters. Biden hasn’t lived up to his billing as a normal president, but the most prominent Republican alternative is dining with antisemites and musing about suspending the Constitution. Biden is a gaffe machine, but so is his adversary. Biden would be 82 years old if inaugurated in 2025; Trump would be 78.
The midterms were proof of concept for the proposition that Biden can use Trump and a Trumpified Republican Party to get the voting public to tolerate or look beyond his own failings. This is a playbook that would be much more difficult to run against Ron DeSantis or other potential Republican nominees.
Now, it’s entirely possible that the second season of Trump versus Biden never makes it to production. Despite all signs indicating that he wants to run again, Biden might pull up short because he doesn’t feel up for it. For his part, Trump has a significant chance of winning the Republican nomination, yet it isn’t a gimme, and it shouldn’t help him that Biden and the Democrats so obviously want to run against him, just as they wanted to run against so many of his acolytes last November.
If the prospect of returning to 2020 is unappealing, look on the bright side: We never really left.
Trump has never let us forget that he lost to Biden (although he prefers to refer to it as getting the election stolen from him), while Biden has never let us forget that Trump is waiting in the wings.
Despite their enmity, both men want and need each other politically, whether that’s what the country is interested in or deserves or not.
[ad_2]
#Opinion #Codependency #Biden #Trump
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023
The top Biden lawyer with his sights on Apple and Google

[ad_1]

From nearly the moment Kanter took office in November 2021, he signaled he wanted a different approach. He inherited several cases from his predecessor, and instead of taking the more typical — and less costly — route of settling them, he announced he’d be bringing them to court to block the mergers entirely. (The successful case against Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster was filed before he started.)
In his tougher approach, he had an ally across town: Khan, who was confirmed as FTC chair five months earlier. Though the DOJ and FTC have different remits and tools — the FTC also polices a variety of consumer harms, and the DOJ has the power to bring criminal charges — there is little daylight between Kanter and Khan’s aggressive antitrust strategies, or their sharp focus on the monopoly risk of global tech companies.
Kanter’s tenure is a “huge departure” from his predecessors, said Alex Harman, director of government affairs, antimonopoly and competition policy at the Economic Security Project, the progressive policy group started by Meta co-founder Chris Hughes. “When you bring hard cases you create a deterrent against illegal mergers and antitrust violators,” Harman said.
His tenure started with a string of losses. Since Kanter took over, the government lost challenges to a merger between rival sugar producers, insurance giant United Health Care’s takeover of a key tech company essential to its rivals’ operations and Booz Allen Hamilton’s deal for a competing national security contractor. The DOJ is appealing the sugar and UnitedHealth rulings, though it dropped the Booz Allen case.
The DOJ also lost its first cases challenging collusion in labor markets, and failed to win any convictions in an unprecedented three consecutive trials against a group of chicken-industry executives for price-fixing.
His first big win didn’t come until Halloween when a judge sided with the DOJ in blocking the Penguin deal. It didn’t just block a deal that would have made the world’s largest publisher even bigger, but also validated the department’s novel argument about why the deal should be blocked: Instead of just focusing on harm to consumers, it also focused on the potential harm to writers, who would have fewer options and less competition to publish their books.
Inside the department, the ruling came as a welcome relief, according to multiple people at the antitrust division. In the run-up to the Penguin ruling, there was internal apprehension that if the DOJ lost, there would need to be a serious rethink of the division’s strategy, the people said.
The DOJ has also begun dismantling a decades-old pay system for chicken farmers it says is deceitful, and is dusting off a little-used law to target conflicts of interest among directors on corporate boards. It is also pushing to revive a long-dormant statute criminalizing monopolization, including a recent case against a violent organization with ties to a Mexican drug cartel.

In a recent event, where he was interviewed by Rule, Kanter acknowledged the difficulty of the job, but portrayed his approach as a long game. “I have faith in our judicial system,” he said. “[If] we do our job, which is to articulate the theories of harm that are based on economic realities, that are based on sound legal and expert theories, we’ll see the kind of success we saw in the Penguin case. But that’s a living, breathing process.”
Antitrust cases can be extremely expensive and time-consuming for the government, since they tackle the best-funded companies in the world. The challenge may only grow this year: Though Kanter has yet to bring a major technology case, in addition to the pending Google case POLITICO has reported that a complaint against Apple is also in the works.
Kanter is currently staffing up a litigation team to challenge more mergers and bring more complex cases challenging monopoly power across the economy. The department reportedly has several other major targets in its sights, including pending investigations of Visa, Ticketmaster, the meatpacking industry, and merger reviews involving Adobe and JetBlue.
And those are just things the public is aware of. “So much of the department’s work is like a glacier,” said Kanter’s top deputy, Doha Mekki, at a recent conference in Salt Lake City, when asked when the DOJ will bring more monopolization cases. “I suspect that you’re going to see plenty of activity in that vein, especially as [Kanter] gets past his first year and focuses more on the affirmative enforcement agenda that he’s described to the public.”
To accomplish that, Kanter is intently focused on expanding the division’s expertise beyond the lawyers and economists who have historically filled its ranks. That includes the recent hiring of the division’s first chief technologist, Laura Edelson, with plans to build out a team of experts under her. “We believe that it’s important to have a range of expertise necessary to do the analysis that accompanies an antitrust investigation or enforcement,” Kanter said in the interview, “and so we’re building that out, almost like a business school faculty.”
Kanter has also canvassed long-term staff for ideas, asking the division to revisit case pitches that previous leadership declined to pursue, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Kanter has used such one-on-one meetings with staff to help build support for his vision for the division’s work.
[ad_2]
#top #Biden #lawyer #sights #Apple #Google
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023
US Prez Joe Biden turns 80, Elon Musk restores Trump’s twitter

[ad_1]
The US President, Joe Biden, is 80 today, which is one thing. On the other hand, Elon Musk restored access to Donald Trump’s account on Twitter on Saturday, lifting a ban that had prevented the former president from using the social media platform ever since a pro Trump mob attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.
Following a vote asking Twitter users if Trump’s account should be reinstated, Musk made the announcement in the evening. With a majority of 51.8%, “yes” was chosen. Before deciding whether to reinstate suspended accounts, Musk had previously stated that Twitter would set up new rules and a “content moderation council.”
“The people have had their say. Trump will get his job back. Musk used the Latin term “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which translates to “the voice of the people, the voice of God,” in his tweet.
Shortly later, Trump’s account, which had earlier looked to be suspended, returned on the platform with all of his prior tweets—more than 59,000 in all. At least initially, his supporters had vanished, but he quickly started getting them back. But as of late Saturday, there have been no new tweets from the account.
Less than a month after Tesla CEO Elon Musk took over Twitter and four days after Trump declared his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, Musk restored the account.
Trump may or may not truly come back to Twitter. Trump, who was an unstoppable tweeter prior to his suspension, has previously claimed that he would not return even if his account was reactivated. He has been relying on Truth Social, a far more modest social media platform that he started after being banned from Twitter.
Additionally, on Saturday, Trump mentioned Musk’s poll in a video address to a gathering of Republican Jews in Las Vegas, but added that he thought Twitter had “a lot of problems.”
“I hear we’re receiving a lot of support to also return to Twitter. I don’t see it because I can’t think of a good explanation for it, said Trump. He said, seemingly alluding to the recent internal turmoil at Twitter, “It may make it, it may not make it.”

Trump’s potential return to the platform comes in the wake of Musk’s purchase of Twitter last month, which sparked widespread worries that the site’s billionaire owner would enable the propagation of lies and misinformation. Musk has often stated his opinion that Twitter has become too censorship-heavy for free speech.
His attempts to redesign the area have been both quick and disorganised. Many of the 7,500 full-time employees and incalculable numbers of contractors who are in charge of content moderation and other critical duties have been fired by Musk. A large number of employees, including hundreds of software engineers, resigned as a result of his demand that the remaining staff promise to work “very hardcore.”
Following the mass layoffs and staff migration, users have noted more spam and frauds on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other issues. Twitter may soon deteriorate to the point where it could actually crash, according to some programmers who were fired or resigned this week.
More than 15 million people participated in Musk’s online survey, which was published on his personal Twitter account.
Musk acknowledged that the findings lacked much rigour. He tweeted early on Saturday that “Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam shortly.” “Some intriguing insights to improve polling in the future.”
He has employed Twitter polling before to help him make business decisions. Following a poll of his supporters, he decided to sell millions of shares of Tesla stock last year.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, tweeted a video of the uprising on January 6 in response to Musk’s poll on Trump. On Friday, she wrote that Trump’s last tweets “were used to fuel an insurrection, many people died, the US Vice President was almost assassinated, and hundreds were injured but I guess that’s not enough for you to answer the question.” It’s a poll on Twitter.
Two days after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and shortly after the former president urged them to “fight like hell,” he was denied access to Twitter. After Trump sent out two tweets that Twitter claimed raised concerns about the integrity of the election and threatened the inauguration of Vice President Biden, the website shut off his account.
Trump was also banned from Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram, all of which are owned by Meta Platforms, after the incident on January 6. Additionally suspended was his capacity to upload videos to his YouTube page. In January, Facebook plans to review its decision to suspend Trump.
Trump’s use of social media throughout his time as president presented a significant challenge to major social media platforms that aimed to strike a balance between the public’s desire to hear from public officials and concerns about false information, bigotry, harassment, and incitement to violence.
However, Musk claimed that Twitter’s move to block Trump was “morally awful” and “very idiotic” in a speech at an auto convention in May.
Musk announced earlier this month that the firm would not permit anyone who had been banned from the site to rejoin until Twitter had developed policies for doing so, including creating a “content moderation committee.” Musk completed the $44 billion buyout of Twitter in late October.
Musk tweeted on Friday that the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee have had their suspended Twitter accounts returned. He emphasised that a choice had not yet been made regarding Trump. On Twitter, he also replied “no” to a request to revive conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account.
The Tesla CEO referred to the new content policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” in a tweet on Friday.
He said that although a tweet that was regarded to be “negative” or to include “hate” would be permitted on the website, only users who explicitly looked for it would be able to view it. According to Musk, such tweets would also be “demonetized, so no adverts or other money to Twitter.”
(With inputs from various media organisations)

(We don’t allow anyone to copy content. For Copyright or Use of Content related questions, visit here.)
To support our Independent Journalism

[ad_2]
#Prez #Joe #Biden #turns #Elon #Musk #restores #Trumps #twitter

November 20, 2022