Crooked Media - What A Day: Suspending, pending ending

Disgraced former president Donald Trump will remain banned from Facebook for now, but like Congress, the Republican Party, and everyone at Mar-a-Lago who chooses not to tie his shoelaces together, Facebook’s oversight board has left the door open for his eventual return.
 

• The 20-member panel, which is largely independent but funded by Facebook, ruled that Facebook was right to suspend Trump over his encouragement of the January 6 insurrectionists. But the board took issue with the “indefinite” aspect of the suspension, and gave Facebook six months to clarify Trump’s punishment. In other words, Trump could be re-platformed later this year, but Facebook must now pull up its big boy pants and make that decision for itself.
   
• While the oversight board’s judgements aren’t legally binding, Facebook tends to defer to them, and on Wednesday, Facebook’s VP of global affairs and communications Nick Clegg confirmed that Trump will stay suspended while the company reviews the decision. Will Facebook also take a good hard look at its own role in fomenting an insurrection, as the board recommended? Clegg said Facebook will totally think about it.
   
• In a characteristically deranged statement, Trump called for the social media companies denying him fundraising platforms to “pay a political price,” before immediately turning the upheld ban into a fundraising opportunity. Prominent Republicans and right-wing media outlets have also lashed out. Meanwhile, in the throes of his social media withdrawal, Trump has made his own little website where he can post his little thoughts. Ladies and gentlemen, the twice-impeached former president is now a blogger.

Trump might be denied his biggest megaphone, but Republicans in Congress can still hear him loud and clear.
 

• You know, when he calls them up to discuss punishing his enemies. On Wednesday, Trump threw his weight behind the GOP efforts to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from House leadership, in a statement attacking her for failing to back his lies about the election. (Also, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Also, former Vice President Mike Pence.) Trump endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who lied about the election so hard she got kicked out of the Harvard Institute of Politics, to replace Cheney as GOP conference chair.
   
• House Minority Whip Steve Scalise has also publicly backed Stefanik for the job, meaning the two top House Republicans have now cleared the way for Cheney’s removal. That vote could happen as soon as May 12, when the House is back in session. Cheney has published an op-ed on why she's standing her ground: "History is watching...We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process." Asked about the GOP-Cheney feud while clutching two bags of tacos, President Joe Biden eloquently spoke for us all: “I don't understand the Republicans."

There’s only so much Facebook’s oversight board can do to clean up the sprawling misinformation junkyard that is Facebook, and there’s only so much a (temporary?) Facebook ban can do to rein in the anti-democratic junk factory that is Donald Trump. The GOP now openly requires the backing of Trump’s big lie as a condition of membership: It’s not comprehensible, but it’s a reality we’d better confront before 2022.

Everybody loves a crossover episode. This week on Keep It, Ira, Louis and Aida are joined by Takeline host Jason Concepcion in an episode that probably should've been called "Take It," but here we are. Check it out now!

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A federal judge has accused former Attorney General Bill Barr of misleading her and Congress about the departmental decision not to prosecute then-president Donald Trump for obstructing the Russia investigation. Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered that a related March 2019 memo from top department officials be made public. The department had argued in court that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of legal reasoning to help Barr make a decision about whether to charge Trump with obstruction, but Jackson ruled that the memo actually contained strategic advice, and that letting Trump off the hook was already a given. You might recall that Jackson isn’t the first federal judge to call Bill Barr a corrupt, lying hack (paraphrasing): Back in March 2020, Judge Reggie Walton (who was appointed by George W. Bush) wrote that Barr’s “misleading” public statements about the findings in the Mueller report “call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility.”

• A Trump-appointed federal judge has struck down the CDC’s eviction moratorium, which could result in a wave of evictions before the federal government can get $45 billion in emergency housing assistance out the door. The Justice Department has appealed the decision.
   
• Dozens of major corporations have joined local Texas businesses in a statement voicing their opposition to the state’s proposed voter-suppression laws.
   
• An Atlanta oversight board has ordered the reinstatement of Garrett Rolfe, the fired police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks last June, based on technicalities of the Atlanta city code.
   
• Retired Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher, who was acquitted of murdering an unarmed 17-year-old ISIS prisoner in 2017—and whom Donald Trump assiduously defended—has admitted that he and his team practiced medical procedures on the fighter with no intention of saving his life: “We killed that guy. Our intention was to kill him. Everybody was on board.”
   
• NOAA has released new climate normals that show average U.S. temperatures rising significantly. These normals are not normal, and must not be normalized.
   
• The U.S. birthrate fell by four percent in 2020 and hit another record low, almost as if the generation that would be having babies were saddled with massive debt, had gotten hit with two recessions, and read a couple of articles about how much child care costs.
   
• Iowa has passed a law that allows landlords to discriminate against low-income renters receiving federal assistance, one of the last (sort of) legal forms of housing discrimination.
   
• Peloton has recalled its treadmills after one caused the death of a six-year-old, and apologized for first defending the product for weeks.
   
• NASA's Perseverance rover has found a Mars rock that looks like a butt, leaving everyone who once complained about the cost of space exploration speechless and red-faced with shame. 

Violence has been escalating at Colombian protests for economic justice over the past week. The protests broke out on April 28 in response to a wildly unpopular, pandemic-related tax overhaul proposed by President Iván Duque, which reignited broader anger over the country’s wealth disparity. Things turned much more violent on Monday, when police opened fire on demonstrators in the city of Cali. The death toll is still unclear: Human Rights Watch said it had confirmed seven deaths since the protests began and was in the process of verifying 18 more, including five in Cali on Monday night. Duque has withdrawn the tax proposal and accepted the resignation of his finance minister, but the protests have started evolving into a larger movement, with demonstrators calling for the withdrawal of a proposed health reform, a universal basic income, and an end to the ongoing police violence.

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Big news here: The Biden administration will support a proposal to waive intellectual-property protections for coronavirus vaccines. 🎉🎉

New York has restored voting rights to people on parole, effective immediately.

CVS has begun accepting walk-in appointments for vaccines at locations across the country.

The Labor Department has withdrawn a Trump-era rule that would make it easier for companies to classify gig workers as independent contractors instead of employees.