Thanks to a user for calling this term to attention. It's going on full force right now.

I think a way to counteract it is to call attention to the debates and/or good things from the other side.

> There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!” In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.[1]

A scandal over California’s failure to keep pesticides out of legal cannabis is causing turmoil throughout the industry, with a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit, the departure of a top cannabis official, the state hiring a private investigator, and a race in the private sector to form a shadow regulatory system in the face of crumbling consumer confidence.

Product testing, confidential lab reports, public records and interviews show California regulators have largely failed to address evidence of widespread contamination, after a Los Angeles Times investigation in June found high levels of pesticides in some of the most popular vape brands. Industry leaders fear those revelations give consumers one more reason to opt out of the higher-priced, highly taxed $5-billion legal market, beset by slumping sales and rising business failures as it is out-competed by the larger, unregulated underground cannabis economy.

But Musk’s success has brought increasing scrutiny from federal regulators, who are weighing the risk SpaceX and other rapidly advancing commercial space operations pose to the environment and the general public against the desire to return the U.S. space program to its past glory.

“These are not only the largest rockets known to mankind but they tend to explode,” said Jared Margolis, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, part a coalition of environmental groups suing the Federal Aviation Administration to block SpaceX launches. “And they’re launching next to a very environmentally sensitive area with no buffer around the launch site.”

The governor took action using his executive powers after efforts to enact a law banning the practice repeatedly failed in the state’s Republican-dominated legislature. Beshear signed the executive order during a statehouse ceremony attended by activists for LGBTQ+ rights.

“Let’s be clear: conversion therapy has no basis in medicine or science, and it has been shown to increase rates of suicide and depression,” Beshear said in a statement. “This is about doing what is right and protecting our children. Hate is not who we are as Kentuckians.”

Arizona’s voter registration system pulls information from the state’s driver's license database as a method of proving citizenship, but the Maricopa County Recorder’s office found a flaw with the database, which incorrectly showed that some people provided proof of citizenship when they applied for a driver’s license.

The issue affects just a tiny fraction of the roughly 4.1 million people registered to vote in Arizona — roughly 98,000 voters who got a license before Oct. 1, 1996, said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Tuesday.

“That's the day when Arizona started requiring proof of legal presence in the United States to get a driver's license,” Fontes said.

The State Department announced Wednesday that Americans can now renew their adult passports online, fully rolling out a system that bypasses the traditional method that required printing out a form and mailing a check.

"By offering this online alternative to the traditional paper application process, the Department is embracing digital transformation to offer the most efficient and convenient passport renewal experience possible," the State Department said in a statement. "Thanks to increased staffing, technological advancements, and a host of other improvements, the average routine passport is being processed today in roughly one-third the time as at the same point last summer, and well under the advertised six to eight weeks processing times."

The report by Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center said the fabricated story was created by a Kremlin-aligned group, dubbed Storm-1516, one of several Russian disinformation networks that Microsoft says is targeting the Harris-Walz campaign in the lead-up to November's presidential election.

The hit-and-run claim surfaced in early September on a website masquerading as a local San Francisco news outlet named KBSF-TV. A five-minute video embedded in the article featured a woman speaking about the alleged incident. Microsoft's report said the woman was a paid actor. The website was created on Aug. 20 and went offline days after it published the claims.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told The Associated Press it will be the “first get-down-to-work meeting” after the UK summit and a May follow-up in South Korea that sparked a network of publicly backed safety institutes to advance research and testing of the technology.

Among the urgent topics likely to confront experts is a steady rise of AI-generated fakery but also the tricky problem of how to know when an AI system is so widely capable or dangerous that it needs guardrails.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills Tuesday aimed at protecting actors and other performers from unauthorized use of their digital likenesses.

Introduced in the state Legislature early this year, the bills specify new legal protections — both during performers’ lifetimes and after death — around the digital replication of their image or voice.

Despite Trump’s loss, Vought pushed to recategorize scores of OMB roles. To an outsider, this might have seemed like a technical adjustment. But in practice, reassignment would have stripped 415 employees—68 percent of the agency’s personnel—of work protections, effectively making it easier for political appointees to fire them. Vought called it “another step to make Washington accountable to the American people.”

In the end, Vought couldn’t get it done by inauguration. But this combination of lofty public rhetoric and ruthless behind-the-scenes gamesmanship has become his trademark. By the tail end of Trump’s turbulent four years in the White House, the OMB director had turned into one of the president’s most trusted and obsequious officials—an acolyte with a knack for making the half-formed schemes from his boss achievable.

This is a great explanation of how trump takes over the media.

> Rachel Maddow outlines the sheer volume of objectively bad news for Donald Trump's campaign since even before he lost the presidential debate to Kamala Harris, and points out the "made-to-order outrage" tactic Trump and his supporters have used to distract from that bad news, even if it means exposing themselves as racist liars and offending the entire Haitian-American community.

All of this follows a NewsChannel 5 investigation in November 2023 that raised questions about Ogles' claims to have personally loaned $320,000 to his campaign in 2022 during his first run for the 5th District congressional seat. Ogles' personal financial disclosures did not reflect the ability to loan his campaign such a large amount.

This past May, Ogles amended his campaign financial reports, admitting that he had only loaned the campaign $20,000.

In August, following another report by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, Ogles acknowledged that FBI agents had executed a search warrant to seize his personal cell phone as part of some unspecified investigation.

The former environmental lawyer filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin on September 3, as he attempted to be wiped off the ticket.

But on Monday, Dane County Circuit Judge Stephen Ehlke denied the request to erase his name from swing state’s’s ballot, ruling that only death can wipe a candidate from the ballot.

“The bottom line here is that Mr Kennedy has no one to blame but himself if he didn’t want to be on the ballot,” the judge said.

The amendment says in part that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” If it passes, it would override Florida’s ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which DeSantis signed into law.

Previous fraud investigations have relied on signatures rejected by local elections offices. But the Department of State didn’t ask for rejected petitions when it reached out to county supervisors in the past few weeks, only the verified ones.

In one case, the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections flagged 32 allegedly fraudulent petitions submitted by a Tampa man. A state investigator interviewed 12 of those voters and found that they did not sign the petitions themselves.

In another case out of South Florida, PCI Consultants, which Floridians Protecting Freedom hired to run the paid petition process, sent a letter pointing out suspicious signatures to a county elections supervisor. State law requires that all petitions be submitted to elections offices, meaning sponsor groups cannot hold back petitions they think may be false.

Just a handful of private companies control the majority of the U.S. freight rail network, leaving large swaths of the country with access to just one or two privatized railroads. The heavily concentrated rail industry's model of maintaining "supernormal profits" and delivering for shareholders by slashing investment, McDonald wrote, runs directly counter to public priorities, including expanded passenger service.

Amtrak, the United States' passenger rail corporation, is managed as a for-profit company and "runs passenger service on tracks that are typically owned by the private Class 1 railroads," McDonald observed. While private railroads are by law required to give preferential treatment to Amtrak's passenger trains over freight, "this has rarely been enforced," leading to often terrible performance.

Bringing the U.S. rail system under public ownership, the new report argues, would be transformational, allowing for greater investment in passenger and freight rail and thus helping to shift away from costly and heavily polluting on-road transportation.

In August, Meadows' attorneys argued the case should be moved to federal court because the indictment "squarely relates to Mr. Meadows's conduct as Chief of Staff to the President.” The argument is similar to the one Meadows has made for months in his Fulton County, Georgia, case, citing a law that calls for the removal of criminal proceedings when someone is charged for actions they allegedly took as a federal official.

U.S. District Court Judge John J. Tuchi said the state charges -- nine felony counts for his role in the effort to overturn former President Donald Trump's Arizona election loss -- is "unrelated" to Meadows' official duties.

"Although the Court credits Mr. Meadows's theory that the Chief of Staff is responsible for acting as the President's gatekeeper, that conclusion does not create a causal nexus between Mr. Meadows's official authority and the charged conduct," Tuchi said.

The ad campaign, shared exclusively with NBC News, was paid for by the Article III Foundation, a dark-money group linked to Mike Davis, a controversial ally of Donald Trump. Voter registration deadlines are nearing, and early voting is beginning in states with sizable Latino populations, like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

It is very rare for noncitizens to try to vote in elections; studies have found virtually no instances of it happening and no evidence that it could be occurring at a rate large enough to affect the outcome of an election. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a group focused on democracy, criminal justice, voting rights and other issues, which has been sharply critical of Trump’s claims of voter fraud, found that in 2016, officials referred to authorities 30 of 23.5 million votes in 42 jurisdictions as having been cast by possible noncitizens.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

Stanford has denied that SIO is ending its work, saying it is simply facing “funding challenges.” But its founder, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, has left, as has its star researcher Renée DiResta, who warned in a June New York Times op-ed that her field was “being dismantled.” Disinformation scholar Joan Donovan recently filed a whistleblower complaint against Harvard, alleging the university dismissed her to “protect the interests of high-value donors with obvious and direct ties to Meta.” (Harvard said her departure was due to her research lacking a faculty sponsor, and insisted “donors have no influence” over its work.)

The conservative legislative onslaught against disinformation shows very little sign of slowing. In May, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced a bill that would ban federal funding for “disinformation research grants, and for other purposes.” The right-wing Cato Institute applauded and praised Massie for fighting back against “censorship.”

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.

Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs, and out-of-town malls.

“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”