October Surprise

Wasn't the pussy tape an October surprise? I recall celebrating like the election was already over and Hillary had it in the bag when that happened.

Bump. What we got going on?

Stock market crash and war between Israel and Iran. On day 1.

The Longshoremen's strike is it! That fucker, Harold Daggett, their President, is Mafia adjacent, he drives a Bentley, and makes nearly $million a year. vicious corrupt and...a Trump supporter.

High minded Biden says he doesn't believe in Taft Hartley and he wants they to bargain in good faith but he doesn't seem to acknowledge this is some ugly political sabotage.

Did anyone watch Rachel's segment on JD Vance last night? He thinks America needs to get over its phobia about having a dictator. Yikes. I think that was one of the Oct Surprises. I've seen people on social media talking about it all day,

Twitter’s Banning of Klippenstein Threatens Press Freedom Across the Political Spectrum

Branko Marcetic Oct 1

It has been hard in recent years to get anyone remotely left of center to care about the threat of tech censorship. The matter has either become such a right-wing obsession or been taken up by various figures who have fallen afoul of liberal opinion that it’s become a virtual point of faith for many that it’s all a bunch of Donald Trump supporters complaining that they’ve lost the ability to spam misinformation online—despite copious evidence to the contrary.

But that could, and certainly should, change now, after Twitter—now known as X—suspended former Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein’s account over a story he had published that was potentially damaging to the Trump campaign, even going so far as to prevent the link to the piece from being shared on the website. In fact, Klippenstein was “permanently suspended,” meaning he has been banned forever, barred from even making a new account. As of the time of writing, you still can’t share his story, with Twitter informing you that the link“has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful” if you try to post it.

Officially, the reason Twitter/X has suspended Klippenstein is because the story he published—internal opposition research on Trump’s running mate J. D. Vance, which was allegedly hacked from the Trump campaign by the Iranian government—contained “unredacted private personal information.” Specifically, the document as published contained Vance’s address and part of his Social Security number (both have been redacted now).

This is similar to what happened four years ago, when the New York Post published its own “October surprise,” using material from Hunter Biden’s laptop while his father was trying to win the presidential election against Trump. On the basis that the laptop’s contents held intimate personal information—which, to be fair, they did, because pictures of the younger Biden’s penis were all over them, as were bank records, his Social Security card, and much more—Twitter not only took the extreme step of locking the Post out of its own account but likewise prevented people from posting links to the Post’s stories. The measure was further buttressed by the intervention of the country’s former spy chiefs, dozens of whom claimed in a public letter that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”—a claim that, it soon turned out, was completely false and had been coordinatedwith the Biden campaign.

Back then, many left-of-center commentators ignored the scandal or even justified Twitter’s actions—after all, the story was seen as an eleventh-hour election boost to Trump. Not so now, when even the most hard-line Democratic partisans are outraged about Twitter’s censorship, since the shoe is on the other foot. (Amusingly, as part of this mindless partisan do-si-do that’s core to US political discourse, the same Right that complained about the Postbeing censored has now taken up its opponents’ rhetoric in support of censorship here, almost verbatim).

Trump tried to start some shit with the Teamsters. It fizzled. So now we have a real thug, the Longshoremen's President, who will definitely cause trouble..