Episode 94: Nathan Sage Held His Campaign Launch Monday. Facebook is the Devil. Top 5 Pope Names.

Podcast Segments:

1. Iowa Coast to Coast (statewide news)

   1. From the DM Register: Standing at a podium in the Knoxville National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum, Democratic U.S. Senate challenger Nathan Sage told a room full of supporters he's running to give the power in Congress back to working-class Iowans. "We've been waiting a long time, and we built the damn table," Sage said at the May 5 event. "It's time we had a seat at it." Sage, 40, is the executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and resides in Indianola. He is challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, who said in 2024 she intends to seek a third term but has not formally launched a reelection campaign. "This campaign isn't about red or blue, it's about right or wrong. It's about building a country that works for the people who make it work," Sage said. "We raise the kids, grow the crops, keep the lights on, staff the hospitals, teach the next generation and then we're always being asked to settle for less. Less pay, less protection, less opportunity." Sage is the first Democrat to formally launch a U.S. Senate campaign against Ernst.

2. Cauc Talk (talking political news)

   1. Dr. Bob’s May Day Rally Report in Des Moines in Deep Midwest: Now I’m going to introduce another concept. In November 2023, I was at a Family Leader Presidential forum in Des Moines. The Family Leader is a right-wing “Christian” group that seeks to bend us all to their will. MAGA Blaze TV had a nice studio set up, and I watched and listened for a while. As they took a break, one personality, who shall remain nameless, scolded another personality saying something like, “NEVER criticize someone to our right! NEVER! Those to the crazy right will make us seem moderate, and people will take us more seriously.” To their right includes Nazis. Never criticize them—a MAGA rule. So what do Democrats do differently? Let’s start with who some Democratic charismatic leaders are. To me, the most charismatic leaders in the Democratic Party are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, and Ro Khanna, who are all left of “center.” And let’s add Cory Booker to the list. (You did go on to mention a few others). Regardless, my interpretation is that Sanders, AOC, Crockett, Khanna, and, to a lesser extent, Booker, have been criticized by the media and the Democratic party as being too far to the left, especially Sanders and AOC. The fact of the matter is that Trump has pulled both Republicans and Democrats so far to the right that Sanders, AOC, Crockett, Khanna, and Booker are really the center. The New Deal Center. Democrats should stop criticizing their left. The far right is radical because they want to demolish government and democracy. The far left just wants to feed and heal people, and give them a living wage, and that is considered radical. It’s preposterous. Much of the left is accepting the framing of the MAGA media. Especially the consultant class, as they seek to move to the imagined “middle.” Bernie, AOC, Crockett, Khanna, and Booker ARE the middle. Moving further to the right is getting closer and closer to legitimizing fascism and betraying our values.

3. Wider Scope

   1. From CNN: A woman said hotel security kicked her out of a woman’s restroom and asked her to “prove her gender” by providing an ID. Ansley Baker said the incident happened Saturday afternoon at the high-end Liberty Hotel in Boston. Baker and her girlfriend Liz Victor were inside a woman’s restroom at the hotel when they said a male security guard came in and started banging on the stall doors. “One of the security guards was there telling me to get out of the bathroom, telling me I am a man in the women’s bathroom. I told him I was a woman,” Baker said. Baker was born a woman, is a woman, and identifies as one. Regardless, she said as she was escorted out of the restroom, offensive comments were hurled at her from other women waiting in line. “Someone said, ‘Get him out of here,’ referring to me. ‘He’s a creep,’ also referring to me,” Baker recalled. Baker described the incident as “humiliating” and said she was pulled out of the restroom before she could finish tying her shorts. “It’s just humiliating overall,” she said. “Like I said, I didn’t have my shorts tied even, and then just in front of everyone.” LGBTQ advocates like Nina Selvaggio with the Greater Boston PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) said this couple’s story is unfortunately nothing new. “Being harassed in public restrooms is a tale as old as time,” Selvaggio said. She believes this case is the result of ramped-up rhetoric in the state, with Massachusetts hate crimes hitting a 20-year high. “I do think the surge in national anti-trans rhetoric is contributing to an increased policing of women’s bodies and their expressions of gender,” Selvaggio said.

   2. From Yahoo: A recent tell-all book by former Facebook insider Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled "Careless People," is blowing the lid on the sheer depravity of the social media giant's targeting machine. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook — which subsequently changed its name to Meta a few years back — from 2011 to 2017, eventually rising to the role of public policy director. As early as 2017, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook was exploring ways to expand its ad targeting abilities to thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across Facebook and Instagram — a decidedly vulnerable group, often in the throes of adolescent image and social crises. Though Facebook's ad algorithms are notoriously opaque, in 2017 The Australian alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit "moments of psychological vulnerability" in its users by targeting terms like "worthless," "insecure," "stressed," "defeated," "anxious," "stupid," "useless," and "like a failure." The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index." "To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of," Wynn-Williams reflects.

4. A.Iowa

From Awful Announcing: The NBA on NBC is making a huge bet on nostalgia. It was finally confirmed during the Kentucky Derby that NBC reached an agreement with John Tesh to officially bring back the iconic “Roundball Rock” theme. And we know that NBC Sports president Rick Cordella is keen on having player introductions be part of the broadcasts once again to help present a big game atmosphere. But now the NBA on NBC is going one more unique step further by featuring the voice of Jim Fagan, the original promo artist who would deliver the classic “This is the NBA on NBC” line before introducing the matchup of the day. Unfortunately, Fagan passed away in 2017. However, the network announced on Tuesday that they have come to an agreement with his family to use an AI generated version of his voice to feature for the return of the package next season. This is not NBC’s first experiment with using AI generated voices. During the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, the network used an AI generated Al Michaels voice to provide custom recaps and highlights that viewers could access at any time on Peacock.