Trump held a “listening session” with survivors of school shootings, but judging by the reporting on Twitter, it was a sour joke – carefully packed with Trump fans, and no naughty rebels allowed.

To help him simulate human reactions, Trump's minders gave him a cheat sheet that prompted him to say things like "I hear you" during the WH listening session on the #Parkland shootings. [@AP Photo by Carolyn Kaster] pic.twitter.com/cEyVNDlvjU

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) February 21, 2018

https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status/966438137936384002

I want to know why Emma Gonzalez and the Parkland students in the national spotlight aren’t at the President’s listening session. The focus seem to be focused on everything but easy access to guns.

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) February 21, 2018

Frame it however you like, this White House "listening session" is an organized institutional cover up for gun lobby–to blunt criticism, pay lip service and do as little as possible to protect the children and people of America. It is murder in a gilded setting.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) February 21, 2018

This is really something – Trump's most enthusiastic proposal, in his "listening session" on school shootings, is: A) encouraging teachers and coaches to carry guns; B) sending a company of armed veterans into schools.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 21, 2018

Please someone write a story as to how the students and parents were screened for this sham of a listening session. Listening to these kids praise Trump in the context of all this is beyond appalling. They're human shields for an industry that is literally killing our children.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) February 21, 2018

Oh god. Oh god. This listening session just got terrifying. Trump is now fully advocating concealed carry for teachers and staff. That's what this was about.

— Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) February 21, 2018

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist at the Washington Post, is disgusted at the things the Twisted Right is saying about the surviving students from Stoneman Douglas high school.

Here is the often-appalling pundit Dinesh D’Souza, outright mocking the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, after they showed their disappointment in a state legislature vote on assault weapons on Tuesday: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

Recall for a moment: These are teenagers whose friends were brutally murdered less than a week ago.

D’Souza, who has a huge social-media following precisely because he sinks so low, so often, also tweeted out his cynical scorekeeping: “Adults: 1. Kids: 0.” And he took a shot at what he called their “politically orchestrated grief.”

There was a backlash, and today he tried to say he was talking about the media, but no one believed him.

But there was far worse out there. Emma Gonzalez, the Douglas High student who made an impassioned speech last week, became the object of the worst kind of racism and sexism.

One Twitter user called her a “brown bald lesbian girl” — disparagement that got some approval from a state legislator’s aide, the same aide who was fired Tuesday for telling the Tampa Bay Times the students were paid and coached actors.

“Both kids in the picture are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis when they happen,” wrote the aide, Benjamin Kelly, speaking of Gonzalez and David Hogg (whom I interviewed last week). That was, of course, a lie.

I wonder how much of this is being fanned or even started by our new companions the Russian Troll Army.

D’Souza’s apology and the legislative aide’s swift firing suggest the wind is blowing in a new direction.

That’s encouraging.

It would also be encouraging to see news organizations who employ those who spread lies taking some remedial action, too.

CNN, for example, pays former Congressman Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) as a political commentator. Here is his point of view, as expressed in a tweet: “O really? ‘Students’ are planning a nationwide rally? Not left wing gun control activists using 17yr kids in the wake of a horrible tragedy? #Soros #Resistance #Antifa #DNC.”

Those hashtags. The trolls have gotten to him.

But also – what does he even mean? What does he think he means? “Left wing gun control activists using 17 year old kids in the wake of a horrible tragedy” for what sinister hidden purpose? What is the concealed motive supposed to be? Using them how? We want gun control in order to reduce the number of gun deaths. Why does Jack Kingston pretend that’s sinister? Why shouldn’t we want to reduce the number of gun deaths? What other bizarro motive could there be? Why does Soros have to be roped into it?

And yes, why the fuck does CNN pay him? There are conservatives who don’t talk stupid shit like that; why not pay them instead?

We have met the Troll Army and it is us.

I didn’t realize the Russian trolls had pounced on the Florida shooting that fast. The Times reported a couple of days ago:

One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

An hour.

So not only do we have a brain-fryingly stupid politics around issues such as gun control and abortion and women’s claim to be actual people, but also the brain-frying stupidity of our politics is like rotting meat to flies. We get the authentic stupid politics and then we get even more of it courtesy of Putin.

That is not fair.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

Almost?

Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.

Those automated Twitter accounts have been closely tracked by researchers. Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

They find us stupid and they make us stupider. And Trump, of course, is gold for them.

Facebook, Google and Twitter have, to varying degrees, announced new measures to eliminate bot accounts, and have hired more moderators to help them weed out disinformation on their platforms.

But since the election, the Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag, which referred to a secret House Republican memorandum that suggested the F.B.I. and the Justice Department abused their authority to obtain a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. The debate over the memo widened a schism between the White House and its own law enforcement agencies.

…

Intelligence officials in the United States have warned that malicious actors will try to spread disinformation ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. In testimony to Congress last year and in private meetings with lawmakers, social media companies promised that they will do better in 2018 than they did in 2016.

But the Twitter campaign around the Parkland shooting is an example of how Russian operatives are still at it.

All so that oligarchs can get even more oligarchy.

Twitter bot purge shock:

(It’s fun writing headlines that would have been gibberish 10 or 15 years ago.)

The hashtag #TwitterLockout has trended after an apparent purge of suspected malicious bots on the social network.

Dozens of users report having had their accounts suspended until they provided a telephone number which they then had to verify, to prove they were real.

Some members have raised concerns about their amount of lost followers, and claimed discrimination against right-wing political beliefs.

Is it the right-wing aspect or the deranged aspect? To put it another way, when so much right-wing pro-Trump discourse is batshit crazy and sounds like trolling whether it’s out of Russia or not, how can one tell whether it’s a bot or just some batshit crazy frothing Trump fan? How, I ask, how?

One researcher who has studied digital disinformation campaigns said a Twitter crackdown should come as no surprise.

“This is a company that’s under a lot of heat to clean up its act in terms of how its platform has been exploited to spread misinformation and junk news,” said Samantha Bradshaw from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project.

“It now needs to rebuild trust with users and legislators to show it is trying to take action against these threats against democracy.”

She too notes the overlap between Trump fans and troll-like bullshittery.

Ms Bradshaw suggested that any appearance of Twitter’s partisanship might be better explained by the different news sources that left and right-wingers prefer.

“Our work indicates a lot of the more conservative Americans were consuming more junk news,” she explained.

“Filter bubbles and echo chambers are more dominant on the right compared to on the left.

“So, I don’t necessarily think it’s an attack on the right, it’s just a reflection about the different ways different kinds of people consume information.”

Especially in the case of the pro-Trump right. Plenty of conservatives detest Trump – Richard Painter, David Frum, Bill Kristol to name just three – while remaining conservatives. Admiring and endorsing Trump is not consistent with being rational and informed.

Florida legislators aren’t going to ban assault weapons just because a bunch of sissy kids think they should.

The Florida House rejects a motion to take up a bill banning assault rifles.

State Representative Kionne McGhee, a Democrat from Miami, asked for an unusual procedural move to consider his legislation, which had been filed earlier in the session but was never scheduled for a hearing.

“The shooting in Parkland demands extraordinary action,” Mr. McGhee said Tuesday on the House floor, as a group of Stoneman Douglas High students, who had previously arrived, peered down from the gallery.

The motion failed, 36 to 71, in a vote along party lines. At least one student burst into tears, Mr. McGhee said. One girl covered her mouth in despair, as a woman patted her arm to comfort her. The episode lasted 2 minutes and 38 seconds.

As the news began to spread aboard a bus of students headed to the capital, Anthony Lopez, 16, a junior, slammed his head back on the bus seat. He placed a hand on his forehead. “That’s infuriating,” he said. “They’re acting inhuman.”

“The one we fear we have is that nothing will change,” he added.

A similar proposal filed last year in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando also went nowhere.

The right to buy an assault weapon, or a hundred assault weapons, is our most sacred right of all. You can take our freedom of speech, our right to assemble, our freedom of association, but our right to amass enough firepower to kill everyone at the next town meeting, don’t even think about it.

The tweet

A woman I don’t know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet) in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago. Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018

The tweet in response

Please, by all means, share the footage from the hallway outside the 24th floor residential elevator bank on the morning of January 11, 2006. Let’s clear this up for everyone. It’s liars like you in politics that have prompted me to run for office myself. https://t.co/ir7EEKoXRU https://t.co/GmkkZ5jUc7

— Rachel Crooks (@RachelforOhio) February 20, 2018

The NPR story:

Trump’s tweets come at a time when his interactions with women over the years are in sharp focus. Last Friday the New Yorker published a piece detailing how the National Enquirer bought exclusive rights to and then never published the story of a former Playboy Playmate, Karen McDougal, who says she had a consensual sexual relationship with Trump in 2006.

This followed a New York Times story a week ago where Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said that shortly before the election, he paid $130,000 to a porn actress named Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the professional name of Stormy Daniels. Cohen has released a statement for Clifford denying she had an affair with Trump in 2006. But in 2011 she detailed the alleged affair in an interview with In Touch magazine that wasn’t published at the time but was released earlier this year.

…

Crooks and two other women were featured on NBC’s Today and held a news conference in New York in December. At the time, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about it in the daily White House press briefing.

“Look, the president has addressed these accusations directly and denied all of these allegations,” said Sanders. “And this took place long before he was elected to be president. And the people of this country, at a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.”

Now what I want to know is…

“Decisive”? A decisive election? One in which the popular vote differed from the electoral vote by 3 million votes? That’s “decisive”? What’s decisive about it? More than for instance one in which the winner has a majority of both kinds of vote? Especially a large majority of both? That’s normally what’s meant by a decisive vote in a US presidential election with its gruesomely unfair electoral college.

Just one of those puzzles.

I wondered why Rob mentioned Dinesh D’Souza…then I saw that the latter was trending on Twitter, so I looked. Oh, that’s why.

Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs https://t.co/Vg3mXYvb4c

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) February 20, 2018

The tweet he shared with that startling gloss:

https://twitter.com/passantino/status/966072311534182401

It turns out the whole thing is a left-wing plot to…um…to corrupt our precious bodily fluids? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely left-wing and a plot. And Soros.

Former GOP congressman Jack Kingston on Tuesday doubled-down on his inflammatory allegations that a group of school shooting survivors pushing for tougher gun laws are simply being used by left-wing political groups. Appearing on CNN, the Georgia Republican suggested that billionaire George Soros and other liberal activists had “hijacked” the “sorrow” of survivors of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, who in recent days have been helping organize a series of pro-gun-control protests.

“Do we really think, and I say this sincerely, that 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” Kingston said on CNN Tuesday. “I would say to you very plainly that organized groups that are out there like George Soros are always ready to take up the charge, and it’s kind of like instant rally and instant protest.”

Do we really think that 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally? If they just saw some of their classmates and teachers blown apart by a guy with an AR-15? Yes, yes I do. In a heartbeat.

Bill O’Reilly also accused the media with applying “extreme peer pressure” on the teenage survivors to promote gun control.

Their remarks coincide with right-wing media stories attacking the credibility of the Florida students who have called for stronger gun laws in the wake of last week’s shooting that left 17 people dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

I will never understand why this is framed as a “left” thing versus a “right” thing. Do conservatives like to see schools shot up? Do they want angry hate-filled young dudes wandering around murdering people whenever they feel like it? Is that really a core conservative value? I don’t think so. I don’t think this is an inherently left v right thing. But contingently it is, so the right is defending their corner with all the irrational fanaticism and meanness they can summon up, which sadly is a lot.

(It’s going to take generations for the US to live down the stain of Trump, but as for the Republicans…centuries, at least.)

Trump and Co want to ditch a law that protects birds. Yeah, who needs birds anyway?

The bird protection law—known officially as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—is more important now than ever. It protects more than 1,000 species of birds by making it illegal to kill or harm any birds not covered by permits.

Stripping the nation’s longest-standing bird conservation law of its authority to protect birds contradicts decades of bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats. If the law is decapitated by the Interior Department and by legislative proposals authored by Wyoming GOP Representative Liz Cheney, millions of our most iconic and beloved birds will be at huge risk.

…

The penalties under the bird protection law are critical incentives for companies to take common sense precautions to help reduce bird kills, such as covering oil pits with nets and marking transmission lines so they are more visible to migrating birds. The penalties create just enough of an incentive that companies have to think twice about where and how they work.

They’re not onerous; they’ve proven to be a helpful incentive to remind companies to do the right thing for wildlife.

The law is good for both birds and industry innovation. A number of good actors— a coalition of power and utility companies —have come together to identify best practices for preventing bird deaths. That has led to the increased use of bird-safe, money-saving technologies.

Wind projects in the west are using video technology to scan the sky and identify eagles as they approach a wind turbine. If the eagle flies too close, the system temporarily shuts off only the turbines in the collision path. And for communications towers, low-tech solutions already in use can be as simple as changing lights on communications towers from steady red lights to flashing lights.

With so many solutions and partnerships between utilities and conservation groups already underway, it is a mystery why just days before Christmas—in the hopes that no one would notice—the Department of the Interior announced it would no longer hold industry responsible for bird deaths.

It’s even more curious that many of the same industries that have been working on these common-sense solutions for protecting birds were encouraging the department’s decision.

The Interior Department announcement followed Cheney’s legislative amendment in November that would eliminate all responsibility from companies for bird deaths.

The bill with her amendment is awaiting a floor vote in the House.

So long, birds.

Up for another Moral Quandary via Twitter session?

The BBC reported yesterday on the BAFTA awards and the MeToo Time’s Up campaigns.

Guests at the Bafta Film Awards showed their support for the Time’s Up and Me Too campaigns by wearing black and sending messages from the stage.

Virtually all the stars at the London ceremony were in black and some were accompanied by rights campaigners.

One of the few in a colourful dress was best actress winner Frances McDormand – but she told the ceremony: “I stand in full solidarity with my sisters.”

It’s all a bit knife-edge, isn’t it – movie stars all dressed up protesting and standing in solidarity with their sisters and stuff. A bit cringeworthy, a bit pseuds’ corner, a bit yeah yeah yeah but what about your sisters in the chicken plants and the strawberry fields? But at the same time, the movie industry is hell on the women who work in it and insultingly bad at representing women on the god damn screen, and yes, it does need to do better.

At any rate, Tom Holland tweeted about it.

It's so moving how everyone kept the #Yazidis in their thoughts… https://t.co/59Tb104TsQ #Baftas

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 19, 2018

Could anything be more expressive of the West's solipsism than that a protest against sexual harassment should seem totally to have overlooked the victims of the century's most barbaric example of rape?

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 19, 2018

To the surprise of no one, a lively discussion ensued.

I think the main problem with “why not the Yazidi women?” is the problem with all forms of Dear Muslima: it’s a way of telling us (women who aren’t Yazidi or Muslim or whatever the category is that day) that we can’t ever discuss issues local to us because there are always worse issues somewhere else. I don’t think that’s what Tom Holland meant by it, but what he said fits into a pattern that we’ve become unpleasantly familiar with.

But in addition to that, what I wonder is, what if someone had mentioned the Yazidi women? How would that have gone?

My guess is that it would have gone badly; that crowds of people would have rushed to tell the glam women off for associating their minor woes with the horrors the Yazidi women lived through.

I have written about the Yazidi women and girls, and about Boko Haram, and about women in India and Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, but I don’t do so at the same time as I write about Harvey Weinstein. I wouldn’t link them, and I wouldn’t add a “remember the women of Iraq and Pakistan and Iran” at the end of a post about Harvey Weinstein.

Anyway, that was yesterday; today Tom Holland tweeted this:

If my study of the French Revolution has taught me anything, it’s that someone even more woke than @PriyamvadaGopal will soon be accusing her of racism.

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 20, 2018

I look forward to it.

The slaughter of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school was a welcome relief to people at the White House, because it took the heat off them for a change. They’d been having a baaaaaad week until then. Whew! Thanks, 17 dead people!

One White House official said the shooting forced the White House to focus on critical and serious issues — like consoling the victims and trying to heal the nation — rather than getting bogged down in what they view as more trivial West Wing drama.

“For everyone, it was a distraction or a reprieve,” said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal conversations. “A lot of people here felt like it was a reprieve from seven or eight days of just getting pummeled.”

The official likened the brief political calm to the aftermath of the October shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 dead and hundreds more injured. That tragedy united White House aides and the country in their shared mourning for the victims and their families.

“But as we all know, sadly, when the coverage dies down a little bit, we’ll be back through the chaos,” the official said.

Awww. That is sad. Poor White House aides. If only there could be a mass shooting every other day.

The three-day Presidents’ Day weekend added to the hiatus, with Trump traveling to his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., with only a few aides and giving others on his beleaguered staff a chance to rest and recuperate.

Among those accompanying the president was Kelly, who earlier in the week appeared in serious jeopardy of losing his job. The chief of staff had lost the support of some senior aides, and last Tuesday evening rumors were rampant that his days — or even hours — were numbered because Trump had been sounding out friends and advisers about possible replacements.

Wednesday’s shooting, how­ever, effectively stabilized Kelly’s standing internally, officials said, shifting the media glare away from him and giving the retired four-star Marine general a chance to perform his job in helping to coordinate the federal response.

So that sure turned out well for Kelly, didn’t it! What a stroke of luck.

“The national tragedy in Florida has really, for now, turned the page on some of these crises,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist close to the White House. “They’re going to come back, but what it does do is give the White House a chance to collect itself and, if they can, organize a communications strategy and get their ducks in a row.”

Yay! Thanks, Nikolas Cruze. What a good citizen.

Newsweek reports:

White nationalist provocateurs, a pair of fake news sites, an army of Twitter bots and other cyber tricks helped derail Democratic Senator Al Franken last year, new research shows.

While everyone has been focused on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to support Donald Trump, the Franken takedown originated in—and was propelled by—a strategic online campaign with digital tentacles reaching to, of all places, Japan. Analysts have now mapped out how Hooters pinup girl and lad-mag model Leeann Tweeden’s initial accusation against Franken became effective propaganda after right-wing black ops master Roger Stone first hinted at the allegation.

A pair of Japan-based websites, created the day before Tweeden came forward, and a swarm of related Twitter bots made the Tweeden story go viral and then weaponized a liberal writer’s criticism of Franken. The bot army—in tandem with prominent real, live members of the far right who have Twitter followers in the millions, such as Mike Cernovich—spewed thousands of posts, helping the #FrankenFondles hashtag and the “Franken is a groper” meme effectively silence the testimonies of eight former female staffers who defended the Minnesota Democrat before he resigned last year.

And so on and so on, with a lot of details.

Bad.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on No politics, please, we’re here to solicit $$$$.

Here’s what I want someone (well, someone other than me, someone with actual influence) to say after the next mass shooting:

The NRA and its lackeys don’t want us to talk about guns now. They say that would be “politicizing” this tragedy. And I say: yes, it would, and that’s exactly why we should do it.

“Politics” has come to be a dirty word, that brings to mind petty bickering and disingenuous posturing. But that’s not all that politics is. Politics is the means by which we, as a society, decide how to govern ourselves. It’s how we make changes that might prevent or reduce the frequency or severity of these tragedies that have become all too common.

Simply put, politics is the way we can come together to address this problem. The gun lobby knows this. While they’re telling us how wrong it is to “politicize” this issue, they’re busy politicking hard. Already they’re emailing their membership lists, scaremongering their supporters about how any discussion of reasonable gun control means that those crazy liberals are a-coming for your guns, so you better buy some more, and donate to us, and warn your government representatives that you won’t stand for it.

And that’s how they keep winning. Polling data consistently shows that reasonable gun control legislation has broad majority support. Most responsible gun owners don’t object to background checks and prohibitions on dangerous individuals owning firearms. But what the gun lobby counts on is that this broad majority doesn’t vote on this issue. That most people won’t make noise with their elected representatives about it, or donate or volunteer or otherwise get active about it. Meanwhile, their side is showing up. They’re voting, they’re donating, they’re making noise, they’re scaring their elected officials into believing that the safe thing to do is to either do the gun lobby’s bidding, or avoid the issue entirely, which amounts to much the same thing.

Even though they’re outnumbered, they keep winning, because their side shows up for the fight, and they’ve persuaded too many of us that’s it’s wrong or vulgar or undignified for us to show up and fight back.

Let’s stop being fooled or intimidated by this. Let’s put an end to not showing up for the fight and then wondering why we don’t win. Like it or not, “politics” is the battlefield on which this issue will be fought, the weapons are your vote and your voice, and the reasonable, sensible majority has disarmed itself for too long. So let’s politicize the shit out of this. Write or phone your Congressperson, your Senator, your state representatives and Governor to demand action. Attend rallies. Vote for, volunteer for, and donate to candidates who are willing to do more than shrug and offer “thoughts and prayers.” And if you can’t find one, than run yourself or encourage others to.

And when the gun lobby cries foul and demands that you stop “politicizing” this issue, you say: you first!