Next Speaker of the House? (16 Viewers)

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    MT15

    MT15

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    There’s a lot of doubt that Kevin McCarthy will be able to get enough votes to become Speaker. It certainly won’t happen on the first ballot. Already Boboert and MTG are publicly at odds over it.

    Maybe this is worth it’s own thread to watch. One person mentioned is Scalise.

     
    More on the porn tracking app
    =======================

    The first thing to say about Covenant Eyes, the anti-porn phone app used by House speaker Mike Johnson, is that it did change my relationship with pornography.

    It dramatically increased the amount of time I spent thinking about it.

    The word “porn” is splashed absolutely everywhere across CovenantEyes.com, where you can create an account and download the app. It appears 18 times on the home page alone.

    The message isn’t positive – “porn creates shame”, “shame fuels porn usage” – but the effect is unavoidable: if porn wasn’t on your mind before you visited Covenant Eyes (unlikely), it sure will be after.

    Turning website visitors into horndogs isn’t quite in Covenant Eyes’ mission statement. The app, which Johnson said he and his family had been using for “a long time”, promises to help people “discover the freedom of living porn-free”, essentially through a shame-oriented method of sending all your phone activity to a designated accountability partner.

    There is no suggestion that Johnson, who is second in line to the presidency, consumes a problematic amount of pornography.

    But it makes sense that the Republican, an outspoken Christian who has described his worldview as “go pick up a Bible”, would be drawn to the app, given Covenant Eyes is also keen on religion. Looking at the reviews, its users seem to be, too.

    “Every Christian man should use it” is one review highlighted on the home page.

    “The accountability that Covenant Eyes provides helps me in my desire to honor god,” says another.

    The app works – when it does work – by taking screenshots of whatever you’re looking at on your phone a couple of times a minute, and feeding the results into its system. From there, AI technology decides what constitutes regular phone use and what it deems to be pornographic incursions.

    When the app thinks you’ve viewed porn, it sends an alert to your “accountability partner”, a trusted person you have designated to help you on your porn-free journey.

    It’s unclear what your partner is actually meant to do with this information – issue a stern telling off, offer an arm round the shoulder, or turn up at your house with a crucifix and some holy water.

    Covenant Eyes might be able to identify a pornography problem, but is that alone enough to help people overcome one?

    In a video clip from 2022 that resurfaced earlier this month, Johnson, 51, said he had been using Covenant Eyes with his son, Jack, who was 17 at the time. The pair received a report on one another’s internet usage once a week, Johnson said.

    He added that his son had “got a clean slate so far” but did not comment on the cleanliness of his own slate. Having used the app for a week, I can confirm that mine, unfortunately, is soiled.

    But soiled unfairly, largely because of issues with what Covenant Eyes considers porn.

    Over the course of several days, the app frequently reacted prudishly to numerous pictures of women, repeatedly flagging distinctly PG content as inappropriate and sending my accountability partner’s phone into meltdown.

    An Instagram photo of a female friend on a beach, wearing a bikini, triggered a push notification to my partner’s phone, wrongfully accusing me of delving into pornography.

    An article about women’s soccer, which had a picture of two athletes after a game wearing their under-shirt garments, did the same.

    Broadly speaking, if a woman’s midriff or upper chest is visible, Covenant Eyes will not like it. It serves as a neat reflection of the evangelical world Covenant Eyes operates within.……

    www.theguardian.com

    I tried Mike Johnson’s favorite anti-porn app. It didn’t go well

    The US House speaker is a longtime user of Covenant Eyes, in which an ‘accountability partner’ tracks the content on your phone
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
     
    Optimus Prime said:
    More on the porn tracking app
    =======================

    The first thing to say about Covenant Eyes, the anti-porn phone app used by House speaker Mike Johnson, is that it did change my relationship with pornography.

    It dramatically increased the amount of time I spent thinking about it.

    The word “porn” is splashed absolutely everywhere across CovenantEyes.com, where you can create an account and download the app. It appears 18 times on the home page alone.

    The message isn’t positive – “porn creates shame”, “shame fuels porn usage” – but the effect is unavoidable: if porn wasn’t on your mind before you visited Covenant Eyes (unlikely), it sure will be after.

    Turning website visitors into horndogs isn’t quite in Covenant Eyes’ mission statement. The app, which Johnson said he and his family had been using for “a long time”, promises to help people “discover the freedom of living porn-free”, essentially through a shame-oriented method of sending all your phone activity to a designated accountability partner.

    There is no suggestion that Johnson, who is second in line to the presidency, consumes a problematic amount of pornography.

    But it makes sense that the Republican, an outspoken Christian who has described his worldview as “go pick up a Bible”, would be drawn to the app, given Covenant Eyes is also keen on religion. Looking at the reviews, its users seem to be, too.

    “Every Christian man should use it” is one review highlighted on the home page.

    “The accountability that Covenant Eyes provides helps me in my desire to honor god,” says another.

    The app works – when it does work – by taking screenshots of whatever you’re looking at on your phone a couple of times a minute, and feeding the results into its system. From there, AI technology decides what constitutes regular phone use and what it deems to be pornographic incursions.

    When the app thinks you’ve viewed porn, it sends an alert to your “accountability partner”, a trusted person you have designated to help you on your porn-free journey.

    It’s unclear what your partner is actually meant to do with this information – issue a stern telling off, offer an arm round the shoulder, or turn up at your house with a crucifix and some holy water.

    Covenant Eyes might be able to identify a pornography problem, but is that alone enough to help people overcome one?

    In a video clip from 2022 that resurfaced earlier this month, Johnson, 51, said he had been using Covenant Eyes with his son, Jack, who was 17 at the time. The pair received a report on one another’s internet usage once a week, Johnson said.

    He added that his son had “got a clean slate so far” but did not comment on the cleanliness of his own slate. Having used the app for a week, I can confirm that mine, unfortunately, is soiled.

    But soiled unfairly, largely because of issues with what Covenant Eyes considers porn.

    Over the course of several days, the app frequently reacted prudishly to numerous pictures of women, repeatedly flagging distinctly PG content as inappropriate and sending my accountability partner’s phone into meltdown.

    An Instagram photo of a female friend on a beach, wearing a bikini, triggered a push notification to my partner’s phone, wrongfully accusing me of delving into pornography.

    An article about women’s soccer, which had a picture of two athletes after a game wearing their under-shirt garments, did the same.

    Broadly speaking, if a woman’s midriff or upper chest is visible, Covenant Eyes will not like it. It serves as a neat reflection of the evangelical world Covenant Eyes operates within.……

    www.theguardian.com

    I tried Mike Johnson’s favorite anti-porn app. It didn’t go well

    The US House speaker is a longtime user of Covenant Eyes, in which an ‘accountability partner’ tracks the content on your phone
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
    Click to expand...

    Can I make Mike Johnson my porn partner?
     
    Optimus Prime said:
    More on the porn tracking app
    =======================

    The first thing to say about Covenant Eyes, the anti-porn phone app used by House speaker Mike Johnson, is that it did change my relationship with pornography.

    It dramatically increased the amount of time I spent thinking about it.

    The word “porn” is splashed absolutely everywhere across CovenantEyes.com, where you can create an account and download the app. It appears 18 times on the home page alone.

    The message isn’t positive – “porn creates shame”, “shame fuels porn usage” – but the effect is unavoidable: if porn wasn’t on your mind before you visited Covenant Eyes (unlikely), it sure will be after.

    Turning website visitors into horndogs isn’t quite in Covenant Eyes’ mission statement. The app, which Johnson said he and his family had been using for “a long time”, promises to help people “discover the freedom of living porn-free”, essentially through a shame-oriented method of sending all your phone activity to a designated accountability partner.

    There is no suggestion that Johnson, who is second in line to the presidency, consumes a problematic amount of pornography.

    But it makes sense that the Republican, an outspoken Christian who has described his worldview as “go pick up a Bible”, would be drawn to the app, given Covenant Eyes is also keen on religion. Looking at the reviews, its users seem to be, too.

    “Every Christian man should use it” is one review highlighted on the home page.

    “The accountability that Covenant Eyes provides helps me in my desire to honor god,” says another.

    The app works – when it does work – by taking screenshots of whatever you’re looking at on your phone a couple of times a minute, and feeding the results into its system. From there, AI technology decides what constitutes regular phone use and what it deems to be pornographic incursions.

    When the app thinks you’ve viewed porn, it sends an alert to your “accountability partner”, a trusted person you have designated to help you on your porn-free journey.

    It’s unclear what your partner is actually meant to do with this information – issue a stern telling off, offer an arm round the shoulder, or turn up at your house with a crucifix and some holy water.

    Covenant Eyes might be able to identify a pornography problem, but is that alone enough to help people overcome one?

    In a video clip from 2022 that resurfaced earlier this month, Johnson, 51, said he had been using Covenant Eyes with his son, Jack, who was 17 at the time. The pair received a report on one another’s internet usage once a week, Johnson said.

    He added that his son had “got a clean slate so far” but did not comment on the cleanliness of his own slate. Having used the app for a week, I can confirm that mine, unfortunately, is soiled.

    But soiled unfairly, largely because of issues with what Covenant Eyes considers porn.

    Over the course of several days, the app frequently reacted prudishly to numerous pictures of women, repeatedly flagging distinctly PG content as inappropriate and sending my accountability partner’s phone into meltdown.

    An Instagram photo of a female friend on a beach, wearing a bikini, triggered a push notification to my partner’s phone, wrongfully accusing me of delving into pornography.

    An article about women’s soccer, which had a picture of two athletes after a game wearing their under-shirt garments, did the same.

    Broadly speaking, if a woman’s midriff or upper chest is visible, Covenant Eyes will not like it. It serves as a neat reflection of the evangelical world Covenant Eyes operates within.……

    www.theguardian.com

    I tried Mike Johnson’s favorite anti-porn app. It didn’t go well

    The US House speaker is a longtime user of Covenant Eyes, in which an ‘accountability partner’ tracks the content on your phone
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
    Click to expand...
    I used the Covenant Eyes program briefly many moons ago. The concept was conceived with good intentions, which was to help Christians, and more specifically ministers deal with temptation. What the program would do was as described in the article, notify an accountability partner, in my case, a fellow minister, of any views of questionable content.
    Typically we'd meet once a month or sometimes more often. Did that for like a year, then quit using it because it was a pain to use. And really, my accountability partner would just ask how I'm doing and we rarely talked about the CE program results.

    I don't think it's as bad as it's being made out to be in the article, but I don't think the program is all that effective either. If someone has a porn addiction, which is a legitimate thing, they have to learn to avoid the triggers that feed that addiction. It's not really any different from other forms of addiction.
     
    not even a little surprising
    ==================

    House Speaker Mike Johnson backed up Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' suggestion last year that the court revisit its landmark rulings on contraception and same-sex marriage.

    CNN's KFILE unearthed an audio clip this week in which Johnson said that what Thomas was "calling for is not radical."

    "In fact, it's the opposite of that," he added.

    Johnson, who is now the Speaker of the House, made the comments in a podcast interview with right-wing commentator Todd Starnes on June 24, 2022 — the same day the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

    Thomas joined the court's other conservative justices in the 6-3 decision, a historic and far-reaching ruling that immediately gutted abortion rights in nearly half of all US states.

    Thomas went even further in his concurring opinion, writing that the justices "should reconsider" its rulings in three landmark cases: Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, which legalized same-sex sexual activity; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage."...........

    MSN

    www.msn.com
     
    In a new book, the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney accuses the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, of dishonesty over both the authorship of a supreme court brief in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election and the document’s contents, saying Johnson duped his party with a “bait and switch”.

    “As I read the amicus brief – which was poorly written – it became clear Mike was being less than honest,” Cheney writes. “He was playing bait and switch, assuring members that the brief made no claims about specific allegations of [electoral] fraud when, in fact, it was full of such claims.”

    Cheney also says Johnson was neither the author of the brief nor a “constitutional law expert”, as he was “telling colleagues he was”. Pro-Trump lawyers actually wrote the document, Cheney writes.…..

    On Tuesday, CNN ran excerptsfrom Cheney’s book, quoting her view that Johnson “appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit”.

    CNN also reported that Cheney writes: “When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal arguments, Johnson would often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”

    But Cheney’s portrait of Johnson’s manoeuvres is more comprehensive and arguably considerably more damning.

    The case in which the amicus brief was filed saw Republican states led by Texas attempt to persuade the supreme court to side with Trump over his electoral fraud lies.

    It did not. As Cheney points out, even the two most rightwing justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who wanted to hear the case, said they would not have sided with the complainants.

    Cheney describes how Johnson, then Republican study committee chair, emailed GOP members on 9 December 2020 to say Trump had “specifically” asked him to request all Republicans in Congress “join on to our brief”.

    Johnson, Cheney says, insisted he was not trying to pressure people and simply wanted to show support for Trump, by “affirm[ing] for the court (and our constituents back home) our serious concerns with the integrity of our electoral system” and seeking “careful, timely review”.

    “Mike was seriously misleading our members,” Cheney writes. “The brief did assert as facts known to the amici many allegations of fraud and serious wrongdoing by officials in multiple states.”

    Johnson, she says, then told Republicans that 105 House members had expressed interest. “Not one of them had seen the brief,” Cheney writes. She also says he added “a new inaccurate claim”, that state officials had been “clearly shown” to have violated the constitution.…….

    www.theguardian.com

    ‘Bait and switch’: Liz Cheney book tears into Mike Johnson over pro-Trump January 6 brief

    Oath and Honor, obtained by the Guardian ahead of release, says House speaker snuck baseless claims of electoral fraud past Republican signatories
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
     
    Johnson is a terrible person, with zero integrity, who will do anything to remain in power. He wants to end democracy and install a religious autocracy. Women, the working poor, LBGTQ folks, and religious minorities will suffer greatly if he gets his way. He has already demonstrated he will lie easily if he feels justified in doing so. I don’t think he will stop at lying. People who think the US is immune to this type of malign influence need to think again.
     
    In the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) traveled down to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and threw a lifeline to the former president, who was under a cloud of controversy for provoking the historic assault.


    The fence-mending session between the two Republican leaders ended with a photo op of the two men, grinning side by side in a gilded, frescoed room.

    The stunning turnabout of the House GOP leader, who had previously blamed Trump for the deadly attack, paved the way for the former president’s return to de facto leader of the Republican Party.


    When the tables were turned almost three years later, however, Trump did not return the favor.

    During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the exchange who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation.


    During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and endorse him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

    “F--- you,” McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people.

    A spokesperson for McCarthy said that he did not swear at the former president and that they have a good relationship. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

    The transactional — and at times tumultuous — relationship has seemingly endured despite McCarthy’s ouster. The two continue to speak and text, according to people with knowledge of the relationship……..

     
    After at least 2 new insurrectionists were identified by Sedition Hunters and arrested, Johnson has decided he will no longer release new Jan 6 footage that may involve “privacy concerns”. Yeah, he doesn’t want any more GOP voters to be arrested is what he means by that. So any footage that would help identify any more criminals won’t be released. The GOP is in the criminal protection business.
     
    Here it is in his own words. They want to protect criminals.

     

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