Month: December 2024

We’ve been suffering pretty catastrophic database problems for the last few weeks, and we’ve had to do several restores that have erased both articles and comments. Nothing has worked to fix the problems so now we are doing a complete rebuild. It’s quite possible that the server will become disconnected to the database again one or more times before the rebuild is completed, so please be patient and maybe save any comments you care about so you can repost them later.

Part of the problem is that GoDaddy bought out our server company and they provide very limited access and service compared to what we had before, which makes it very hard to identify problems and work on fixes.

Everything is backed up now, so at least we won’t lose our history, but we’re still not sure we have the wherewithal to fix this thing. If not, we’ll figure out next steps, but I don’t have the budget to hire a team to do this.

One way to help out is to visit our Patreon page and become a podcast donor.

I really apologize for the inconvenience. It’s annoying me because I have a long list of things I want to write about, but it’s hard to commit when it feels like it will just get erased in a crash and I’ll have to repost it.

Wish us luck!

I would have lost all respect for President Joe Biden if he stood by and allowed his son Hunter to go to prison. On Sunday, he made sure that would not happen by issuing a broad and blanket pardon for any offense Hunter may have committed since 2014. In doing so, he rendered moot the sentencing his son was due to receive on December 12 for his trumped-up conviction on federal gun charges and on December 16 for federal tax evasion charges.

If there’s a valid criticism of this decision, it’s really only that it broke a commitment Biden made not to pardon Hunter. If you want to say he lied, I suppose you can. Personally, I never believed Biden would allow his son to be incarcerated, particularly on the gun charges.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind about Hunter is that he is a recovering addict who has maintained his sobriety for over five years.

…Hunter Biden said he had “admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport.”

“Despite all of this, I have maintained my sobriety for more than five years because of my deep faith and the unwavering love and support of my family and friends,” he added. “In the throes of addiction, I squandered many opportunities and advantages. In recovery we can be given the opportunity to make amends where possible and rebuild our lives if we never take for granted the mercy that we have been afforded. I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”

In his statement, the president made reference to this:

Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.

It’s important to understand what Biden is saying here because he’s right. This isn’t example of the rich and powerful getting lenient treatment, but the exact opposite. An average person would never have been prosecuted for failing to disclose their substance abuse problem on a gun form. If that were routinely charged, half of MAGA world would be in federal prison. And people who run into financial difficulties due to addiction are not usually sent to prison for tax offenses if they’ve gotten clean and made full restitution. The reason the book was thrown at Hunter was because of unrelenting pressure from Republicans who showed no mercy or compassion or forgiveness to Hunter in their zeal to gain a political advantage.

Under these circumstances, Biden would be a terrible father and person if he put some supposedly high-minded principle over protecting his son, who is still a fragile and damaged person struggling to live the right way.

Anyone who argues otherwise is either seeking a political advantage once more or simply a dunderhead.

In our first podcast since the devastating reelection of Trump (available at Spotify, Amazon, IHeartRadio and Apple), Brendan and I try to cheer everyone up at Rudy Giuliani’s expense. Then we turn our attention to Trump’s announced cabinet and the public’s inexplicable positive reaction. And we finish up on a positive note by discussing the potential of BlueSky to serve as a tool that can save both the traditional media and left-wing content producers.

We encourage your likes, follows, and subscribes wherever you get your podcasts— The best way to support our work financially is on Patreon.

I’m not paranoid, but I did notice that just as I was getting a surge of Blue Sky followers coming over from Twitter, my database here at Progress Pond got badly corrupted leading to several days of downtime. It didn’t help that my son had a two-day soccer tournament in Lancaster County this weekend that made it difficult for me to address the problem. In the end, we had to use a backup of the database, which probably erased some people’s recent comments. I apologize for that, but nothing else worked to fix the problem. I still don’t know what caused the crash, so it’s possible it will recur.

In the meantime, I encourage you to try Blue Sky for your social media needs. I have a couple of Starter Packs you can use. One includes people who were prominent parts of the progressive blogosphere and the other is made up of folks who were part of the early days of the Philadelphia chapter of Drinking Liberally. Unsurprisingly, if you know your history, there is some overlap.

The main advantage of Blue Sky over X/Twitter is that it doesn’t have an algorithm that prevents you from actually seeing posts from people you follow. That’s a big problem on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. It works both ways, too. Only a tiny percentage of my followers on Twitter will ever see my tweets. Meanwhile, right-wing content producers are boosted by the algorithm. At Blue Sky I get much more engagement even with a fraction of the followers, and it’s not filled with hate and propaganda, so that’s nice, too.

I’m hoping this will help Brendan and me overcome the problem we’ve faced promoting our podcast. We’ve had a bit of a fallen tree in the forest problem thanks to changes in how both X/Twitter and Facebook treat posts with outside links, as well as Musk’s war on the left-wing influencers. I think at Blue Sky, we have a real chance to get some listeners, and maybe some financial supporters as well. The best way to help us there is to like and subscribe to our podcast, and to head over to Patreon and lend us a hand.

Here is a gift link to Julia Angwin’s New York Times article on how “the red tide that swept across the nation in our recent election marked many things. One of them was a right-wing triumph over social media.” Here’s a taste:

Under heavy pressure from the right, and with the help of X owner Elon Musk, the leading tech platforms opened the floodgates for propaganda to spread unchecked. The result was a flood of lies and distortions flowing through our social media feeds. That led to possibly the most misinformed electorate we’ve ever seen.

Many voters headed to the polls convinced that border crossings are higher than ever before (they are not), violent crime rates are rising (untrue) and inflation is soaring (ditto). We will never know how much this garbage may have swayed voters, but we do know it influenced one side significantly: conservatives.

Combine this lowering of guardrails with the tech chief executives’ obsequious public congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump after his resounding win, and it’s hard not to see this striking turnaround in political terms. “In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: a president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation and defang labor laws,” the journalist Brian Merchant wrote in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.

And with Mr. Trump soon in office, the landscape may get worse before it gets better. Brendan Carr, tapped by the incoming president to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, posted on X after securing the nomination a call to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

As Nate Cohn details in the New York Times, this all helped move most demographics against the Democrats and the left, particularly among the working class of all races. If you’re a regular reader here, you know I have been warning of this since I did my first autopsy of the 2016 election. Perhaps you should revisit my June 2017 feature article in the Washington Monthly: