Noteworthy News

[Angrboda]

Republicans appear to have all but abandoned their efforts to defeat a Democratic gerrymander of California’s House districts one week before it goes before voters.

As Democrats pummel the state with Yes on 50 advertising, the Republican side of the battle has gone quiet. Major GOP donors and party leaders have effectively vanished from the front lines.

The biggest funder of the campaign to defeat Proposition 50, Charles Munger Jr., has not contributed any significant cash to the cause in weeks, and his Protect Voters First committee cut its weekly spending from more than $4 million to less than $300. The other opposition committee, Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab, spent $155,000 on advertising last week, compared to $3.8 million from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Yes on 50 campaign.

“It’s as full-throated a campaign for Democrats in California as if we were in the middle of a presidential election,” said Jon Fleischman, a former executive director of the California Republican Party. “But you can go to the house next door, occupied by Republicans, and it’s crickets — other than receiving their ballot in the mail.”

California Republicans retreat as anti-Prop 50 campaign collapses

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Across the country, police departments are struggling with ballooning response times, with jurisdictions reporting that they have doubled the time it takes to react to 911 calls. What we are seeing is a rapidly developing erosion of the “thin blue line.”

This breakdown should give pause to every law enforcement officer, who now must wonder if their “brothers in blue” will be there. In the dispatch logs, federal agents reported they were boxed in by 10 vehicles, under attack and requested urgent backup. In response, the Chicago Police Chief of Patrol can be heard on dispatch recordings ordered: “No units will respond.”

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This crisis is not limited to Chicago. In New York City, tensions are escalating over the impending mayoral election. Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who has in the past called for the defunding of the NYPD, has triggered threats from officers who say they may quit en masse if he is elected.

Chicago Police, ICE and the fraying of the thin blue line  

From the article:

The collapse of law enforcement capacity is not inevitable, but neither is its recovery. It will require a reknitting of trust between police and citizens, layered resilience, and a shared awareness that safety is a public good, not a spectator sport. 

This was precisely what the ‘defund the police’ movement was meant to do - rebuild trust in law enforcement by taking a portion of their funding and invest it in social work. When cops are called out to arrest the homeless or some college student with two joints in her backpack, it creates a picture of cops as the enemy.

Republicans were tremendously successful at spinning ‘defund the police’ as ‘get rid of police departments.’ Democrats were shit at not countering that spin.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Just as context, that call was entirely fraudulent. They were not boxed in, they were not under fire. They attempted to murder a woman after hitting her car in traffic, fled the scene leaving her to bleed out, then came up with a bullshit story immediately disproved by their own dash and body cams as well as the testimony of eye witnesses and first responders. Seems to me like dispatch already knew they were liars. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they'd been making batshit batphone calls for weeks by that point and chicago pd was over it. Very little point in getting your own officers implicated in federal malfeasance.

Talk about the times we're living in, got me over here defending the fucking cops.

[The Valkyrie]

Elon Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI that the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia.

The site resembles Wikipedia in style and format, with articles on topics such as ChatGPT, Diane Keaton and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But it appears significantly smaller, more opaque in its workings — and more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.

Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, begins with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex....” Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”

The project is Musk’s latest bid to harness Grok, the ChatGPT-like AI system developed by his company xAI, to offer right-leaning, freewheeling alternatives to popular mainstream tech tools. Some Musk admirers greeted its debut with excitement Monday, while critics highlighted examples of articles that contained falsehoods or passages that copied Wikipedia verbatim.

Elon Musk launches a Wikipedia rival that extols his own ‘vision’

What, did "conservapedia" collapse?

[Thumpalumpacus]

If Wikipedia is your benchmark for quality, and you're starting up chasing them, that's not a good thing.

[Paraselene]

US judge blocks Trump administration from halting Snap food benefits

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr433x9zqq4o

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

US judge blocks Trump administration from halting Snap food benefits

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr433x9zqq4o

If recent history is any indicator, the Trump regime will try some sort of end run around the rulings in order to fulfill their goal of letting people starve.

Boru

[Angrboda]

There's always the shadow docket.