Right-wing Democrats in Congress tried to sabotage the House plan to insist on passing the Build Back Better welfare bill before considering the badly compromised infrastructure bill. But progressive Democrats stood firm and blocked this.

Those right-wing Democrats could kill the bill straight out — but they would draw lots of ire, and it would harm their chances of reelection. We have to hope they decide not to do that.

AI language models often respond to embarrassing questions with falsehoods.

*Mass protests in Brazil call for Bolsonaro's impeachment.*

19 of the top 20 Facebook pages for American Christians are run by Eastern European troll farms, according to a Facebook internal investigation.

What this amounts to is that the troll farms have developed channels of mass influence in the US -- for elections, for instance. Most of the time, they will imitate what their target Christians would say. On occasions, they say what some powerful entity tells them to say.

(satire) *‘Bon Appétit’ Publishes Blank Issue After Nothing Sounded Good.* *The U.S. needs to make its asylum policy clear. It needs to define who it will allow to seek asylum and apply that standard without discrimination.*

If we do this, we should not expect the same results for Haiti and Afghanistan, because there objective differences between the two situations.

Afghanistan has been taken over by a government that seems to be trying to kill people for having worked with the US. That gives many Afghans a claim for asylum under international treaties. Although many Haitians have suffered greatly, and part of the cause is due to US wrongdoing, they are not facing murder or torture if they remain in Haiti.

The US should do something to help the destitute people of Haiti, but giving some of them asylum is not the only way, or necessarily the best way. Perhaps aid to poor people in Haiti would do a better job.