There is a disturbing report this week that U.S. intelligence may have nudged foreign intelligence to surveil dozens of Trump associates. The request to the “Five Eyes” agencies allegedly was made by Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan...https://t.co/jQ3YkB3H9D

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) February 15, 2024

The White House arguing, from the podium, that it no longer believes the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution "serves the interests of the United States."

Super. https://t.co/GMMWjf70gH

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 14, 2024

Grandpa bumbasher is fricking awesome and I would have gay s*x with him

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ap0gqq/lol_hey_guys_biden_campaign_joins_tiktok_to/ can't stop sucking old man peepee as usual

https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1ap2rqm/biden_joins_chinese_spy_app_tiktok_despite_white/

https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/1aqsvvf/lol_hey_guys_biden_joins_tiktok_despite_security/

https://old.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1apnf2n/lol_hey_guys_biden_joins_chinese_tiktok_despite/

Biden joins TikTok despite White House banning government accounts

The reelection campaign for US President Joe Biden has joined TikTok, despite the White House banning government agencies from using the app.

The first video on the platform, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, appeared on Sunday during the NFL's Super Bowl.

By Monday morning, the @bidenhq account had gained more than 30,000 followers, with the video receiving 3.4 million views and 356,000 likes.

ByteDance is under review in the US for potential national security concerns, with some lawmakers calling for an outright ban over fears that the Chinese government could access people's data or use it as a tool for propaganda.

Last year, the Biden administration ordered government agencies to remove TikTok from federal government-owned phones and devices.

TikTok has maintained that it would not share US user data with the Chinese government and has taken substantial measures to protect the privacy of its users. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.

Biden campaign advisors said in a statement it would “continue meeting voters where they are,” including on other social media apps like Meta Platform's Instagram and Truth Social, which is owned by former US President Donald Trump.

The campaign is taking “advanced safety precautions” for its devices and its presence on TikTok was separate from the app's ongoing security review, a campaign official added.

Mr Trump, the Republican frontrunner in the presidential race, does not have an official account on TikTok.

The video posted by the Biden-Harris HQ TikTok account made light of a fringe conservative conspiracy theory that the Super Bowl was rigged in favour of the Chiefs, in order for pop superstar Taylor Swift, who is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, to announce an endorsement of Biden.

Amid rapid-fire questions asking the president to choose from one of two options, Biden was asked if he was “deviously plotting to rig the season so the Chiefs would win the Super Bowl” or whether the Chiefs were simply just a good football team.

“I'd get in trouble if I told you,” Mr Biden joked.

The typically young demographic of TikTok users means political campaigns around the world are increasingly turning it to target younger voters.

Speaker Hakeem Jeffries soon...

!chuds !nooticers

lol

Also they think movies are real

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/05/comments-on-weibo-giraffe-post-bemoan-state-of-chinese-economy

!glowies !burgers

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1ao8nm7/donald_trump_threatens_nato_says_he_would

Holy shit! She’s fucking wasted.

pic.twitter.com/rN0bYa2Pf9

— Bad Hombre (@joma_gc) February 10, 2024

I recently witnessed a significant "family meeting" type discussion in /r/law after the Fanni Willis debacle. Experienced trial attorneys making politically agnostic observations about potential impacts to the case were being down voted into oblivion for the mere act of being politically agnostic and acknowledging even the possibility that Willis could have acted in a way that could negatively impact the case. The adults in the room circled the wagons. The consensus was that any thread that achieves a minimum critical mass of participants will attract partisan non-experts whose interest in facts and reality is secondary to their interest in every situation conforming to their preconceived notions.

r/law used to have high quality legal discussions like three years ago. Now it's r/politics with a thin veneer of “objectivity”

This post is one of the bad legal takes on this sub that it purports to call out.

“You can think that the stakes are so high here that the justices should depart from textualism and original public meaning to read the phrase more broadly. You can upvote all the people who say Trump should lose”

Just read Baude's extensive paper. Disqualifying trump likely follows the text original intent and original meaning of the 14th amendment. Pretending disqualifying Trump is “progressive” constitutional interpretation is disingenuous and misleading

This article combined with the Federalist society argument is not a novel “progressive” constitutional theory.

There is ample historical evidence that the president was considered an officer at the time of drafting and ratification.

Yeah, it's hard to take posts like this seriously.

We are posting in a midwit thread on God

WORDSWORDSWORDS MY SO WORDSWORDSWORDS

!Neolibs, do you think you know more than the supreme court?

Because of his age and his determination to run for a second term, President Biden is taking the American public into uncharted waters. He is the oldest person ever to serve as president, is the oldest ever to run for re-election and, if he is successful, would be 86 at the end of his tenure. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, was an unprecedented 77 when he ended his second term in 1989.

A remarkably broad swath of the American public --- both Mr. Biden's supporters and his detractors --- have expressed increasing doubts about his ability to serve for another five years because of his age. As Nate Cohn, The Times's chief political analyst, noted, "In Times/Siena polling last fall, more than 70 percent of battleground state voters agreed with the statement that Mr. Biden's 'just too old to be an effective president.'" But the release of the special counsel Robert K. Hur's report on Thursday --- and Mr. Hur's assessment that the president presents himself as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" --- will invariably test the trust that the American people have in their president.

Mr. Biden's performance at his news conference on Thursday night was intended to assure the public that his memory is fine and argue that Mr. Hur was out of line; instead, the president raised more questions about his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable responses to fair questions about his fitness.

His assurances, in other words, didn't work. He must do better --- the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House.

Mr. Biden's allies are already going to the usual Washington playbook of dismissing the special counsel's report as partisan. Regardless of Mr. Hur's motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. He needs to be out campaigning with voters far more in unrehearsed interactions. He could undertake more town hall meetings in communities and on national television. He should hold regular news conferences to demonstrate his command of and direction for leading the country.

As it stands, he has had less substantive, unscripted interaction with the public and the press than any other president in recent memory. As Michael Shear of The Times reported last year, "In the 100 years since Calvin Coolidge took office, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan held as few news conferences each year as the current occupant of the Oval Office." As of late January, he had also given fewer interviews than the last six presidents: only 86. Mr. Trump gave 300, and Barack Obama gave 422. For the second year in a row, Mr. Biden has even refused to do an interview before the Super Bowl, a practice that allowed presidents to speak to Americans informally before the country's largest sporting event of the year, unpersuasively citing a desire to give the public a break from politics.

This is part of a concerted, modern White House strategy to reach Americans through online influencers or tightly produced videos, rather than public encounters that might challenge him. But the combination of Mr. Biden's age and his absence from the public stage has eroded the public's confidence. He looks as if he is hiding, or worse, being hidden. The details in Mr. Hur's report will only heighten those concerns, which Mr. Trump's campaign is already exploiting.

This is a dark moment for Mr. Biden's presidency, when many voters are relying on him to provide the country with a compelling alternative to the unique danger of Mr. Trump. On the most important questions --- of integrity, record of accomplishment and the character required to be fit for the presidency --- there is no comparison between them. In the most challenging moments of his presidency, in supporting our allies when they are threatened and in steering the U.S. economy away from recession, Mr. Biden has been a wise and steady presence. He needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86.

!chuds !nooticers what did the NYT mean by this