Google, Migrant Girl, Collusion: 3 Stories You Should Read 12/14/2018
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In the category of: Wake-up call.
Sorry, President Trump, collusion IS a crime
Having worked as a federal prosecutor for 13 years in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, I can report that the President and his lawyers are wrong. Collusion is a crime. The federal criminal code says so. The federal bribery statute –– 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(2)(B) — makes it a federal crime for a public official to “collude” in a fraud on the United States. More specifically, the federal bribery statute expressly states that a crime is committed when a public official “directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value … in return for … being influenced to … collude in … any fraud … on the United States.”
In the category of: The human cost of inhumane treatment.
The 7-year-old “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”
A 7-year-old Guatemalan girl died last week while in Border Patrol’s (CBP) custody. But a statement the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) released Thursday night about her death raises more questions than it answers.
The Washington Post reported that CBP told them the girl “died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert.”
According to CBP, the girl was traveling with a group of 163 migrants and was in CBP custody for more than eight hours before she started having seizures. She was transported to a hospital in El Paso, where she died. CBP says she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”
In the category of: Type “idiot” into Google and see what comes up.
The real reason Republicans should be concerned Google skews liberal
Evidence of any systemic bias in how Google or the other tech titans operate ranges from inconclusive to vaporous. And these businesses would be crazy to engage in such behavior. Google’s entire ad-driven business model depends on attracting massive numbers of users by providing them the most useful and relevant search results. And as industry analyst Ben Thompson notes, “It follows, then, that the company is heavily incentivized to serve as many users as possible; being purposely biased against approximately 50 percent of them would be illogical.”
So instead of quizzing Pichai and other tech execs about loopy bias accusations, perhaps Republicans should have asked this question: “Why do all those smart, optimistic, hard-working young people at your companies find so little that’s appealing about today’s Republican Party?” At the very least, Republicans should be asking themselves that question. Or are techies just another group the GOP is content to write off even as technology becomes an ever-more important part of the economy and our everyday lives?
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