Elon Musk and other billionaires invest staggering sums into electing Trump, plus other takeaways from third-quarter filings Musk, the world’s richest person, gave nearly $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that he helped form over the summer – a massive cash infusion aimed at helping turn out voters in key battleground states. Adelson, a staunch Trump backer and heir to a casino fortune, gave even more, plowing $95 million into another outside group backing the former president, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission covering the three months ended September 30. ............... Altogether, just three billionaires – Musk, Adelson and Midwestern packaging magnate Richard Uihlein – donated roughly $220 million in a three-month period to groups backing the Republican’s candidacy. ............ Harris has set a blistering pace – raising $1 billion since she became the Democratic standard-bearer in late July – a milestone achieved faster than any other presidential contender. And Tuesday’s filings show that a high-dollar fundraising committee that channels money to her campaign and aligned Democratic committees, took in $633 million during the third quarter – four times the amount raised by Trump’s equivalent fundraising arm in that time.......... In the battle for control of Congress, meanwhile, individual Democratic incumbents and candidates in some key Senate and House races widened their financial advantage over their Republican opponents.
India says no auction of satellite spectrum after Musk decries move Telecoms Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said during a New Delhi event that the spectrum will be allocated administratively in line with Indian laws, and its pricing worked out by the telecom watchdog.......... "This spectrum was long designated by the ITU as shared spectrum for satellites," Musk said, referring to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency for digital technology. ......... "Satellite companies who have ambitions to come into urban areas, serving elite retail customers, just need to take the telecom licenses like everybody else... they need to buy the spectrum as telecom companies buy," Mittal, who is also the chair of Airtel, said at the New Delhi event. ......... Earlier in 2023, both Eutelsat unit OneWeb and Airtel had voiced concerns about auctioning the spectrum in their submissions to the Indian government. ......... Musk's Starlink and some global peers like Amazon's Project Kuiper back an administrative allocation, saying spectrum is a natural resource that should be shared by companies.
Elon Musk expands his empire of misinformation
At any Tesla event, you have to go in expecting a good amount of smoke and mirrors. This is the company run by Elon Musk, after all — its self-anointed Technoking who’s made overpromising and underdelivering a theme of his career........... But Thursday’s “Cybercab” robotaxi unveiling was, even by Musk-ian standards for bluster, one giant optical illusion. The kind of spectacle that should remind everyone that the world’s richest person is someone who promotes and appears to relish misinformation and hyperbole on a mass scale, whether he’s speaking to investors, his millions of followers on X or whichever politician he feels is most likely to agree with his increasingly right-wing and conspiracy-laden worldview........ the fact that the robots were not actually autonomous and were being operated remotely by humans ............ At one point, an attendee even got a bartending bot to admit that it was being assisted by a human. ........... Over the weekend, federal emergency workers were forced to halt their in hurricane-hit North Carolina after National Guard troops reported that an “armed militia” was “hunting FEMA
Elon Musk battles Indian billionaires over satellite internet spectrum Starlink head in spat with owners of Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel mobile networks who have called for space bandwidth auctions ......... A person close to the company said only services reaching currently unserved communities should be assigned spectrum, to allow for a “level playing field” after Indian operators invested “billions of dollars” in terrestrial connections. .......... “It’s more about ensuring that the telecom industry remains in control of the local players rather than foreigners coming in and dictating their agenda,” they said. “I can’t think of any other explanation, it’s not like there’s a scarcity of spectrum, it’s abundant.” ......... A simple assignment of spectrum may hand Musk’s company, the largest and most successful of its kind, a “first-mover advantage”, while an auction process would allow Indian players time to get their products market-ready, said the person close to Reliance. ......... Musk told Modi last year that he wanted to bring Starlink, which operates more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites, to India to connect remote communities........ Musk also has his eye on the long-term potential of India as a location for a Tesla plant, despite cancelling a trip to New Delhi earlier this year to prioritise talks with and focus on its Asian rival China.
No spectrum auction: Government after Elon Musk objects to Mukesh Ambani's pitchTelecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has announced that India will follow the global trend of administrative spectrum allocation. The decision came after Starlink CEO Elon Musk objected to Ambani's Reliance Jio lobbying for the auction route.
Elon Musk Takes On Mukesh Ambani's JIO Explained why SATCOM technology is unlikely to disrupt incumbent telecom players in India Masterstroke by Mukesh Ambani, big trouble for Elon Musk, game over for Starlink? Jio has made its apprehensions known to the government about international corporations like Starlink and Amazon Kuiper looking to introduce their satellite internet services in India. Elon Musk Challenges Ambani and Mittal on Satellite Spectrum Scindia: No Satellite Spectrum Auction Scindia emphasised that the pricing structure would be determined by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. India Sides with Elon Musk on Satellite Spectrum as Ambani, Mittal Prepare for Intense Battle Telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has given blow to Indian telecos, including Reliance and Airtel, who have been advocating for the auction method ........ the minister cited the Telecommunications Act 2023 and global practices to back his stance on spectrum allocation. .......... “For satcom, spectrum will be allocated administratively...that does not mean that spectrum does not come without a cost. What that cost is and what the formula of that costing is going to be...will be decided by the TRAI,” said Scindia. Satellite spectrum across the globe is allocated administratively, and India is taking the same route, he added. ........ The key issue pointed out by Reliance was TRAI’s failure to provide a level playing field between satellite-based and terrestrial access services. In the letter, the telecom giant cited the Supreme Court judgement in the 2G case and hinted towards a legal battle that might surface if concerns remain unresolved.
America Is on the Brink of a Great Political Realignment. It’s Already Visible in Arizona. “I believe that God voted early on July 13, when he spared the life of Donald Trump.” ......... “I do not believe that if you love the Lord, read the Bible and call yourself a Christian, that you can vote for Kamala Harris for president,” he said at Dream City. ......... Its strategy, which it calls “chase the vote,” is to tap into new parts of the electorate by targeting what the campaign calls “low propensity voters,” the sort of alienated, disconnected people, especially men, who’d presumably gravitate toward Trump if they could be bothered to cast ballots at all. “We’re going to make it too big to rig on Election Day,” said Kirk. ............. Much of what they said was MAGA boilerplate. But a surprising subtext of their conversation was the problems that Trump’s character and personality create for Republican turnout. ........... In this citadel of MAGA spirituality — the ex-president himself spoke there at a Turning Point event in June — I’d expected to hear Trump praised in exalted terms, not justified as the lesser of two evils. But Carson argued that, unless Jesus Christ himself is on the ballot, the lesser evil is the choice in every election. ............ In 2016, Democrats hoped that Trump’s evident indecency would spur a significant number of Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” predicted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York. It didn’t work out that way. ............... During the Trump years, as Republicans have improved their margins with working-class voters, Democrats have made gains with educated suburbanites and, more broadly, with those who fundamentally trust American civic institutions. This realignment is remaking politics in states including Georgia, which is now a swing state, and Ohio, which used to be one but isn’t anymore. But perhaps no place has undergone a partisan revolution quite like Arizona’s. .............. Arizona voted for Joe Biden in 2020, albeit by the smallest margin of any state, fewer than 11,000 votes. The state has one Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, and one Democrat-turned-independent, Kyrsten Sinema, who is likely to be replaced by a Democrat .......... “I never felt particularly comfortable with those folks, but the Republican Party was a big tent, and you could be a John McCain-style Republican and feel at home in the Republican Party. That’s no longer the case.” ............... In 2022, Republicans nominated Mark Finchem, a onetime member of the Oath Keepers militia, to be secretary of state. Now running for State Senate, he recently retweeted a QAnon video accusing the Rothschild banking family of engineering the Civil War. .......... Rusty Bowers, the very conservative former speaker of the Arizona House, has been driven out of Republican politics for refusing to go along with the “stop the steal” movement. He lost his last primary to David Farnsworth, a businessman who described the 2020 election as “a real conspiracy headed up by the devil himself.” .................... describing Turning Point as more powerful than the Republican National Committee. .............. Election conspiracy theories nullify any incentive for the party to moderate after its losses .............. It was Turning Point, after all, that turbocharged the political campaign of Kari Lake, the extraordinarily unpopular Republican Senate candidate. In 2021, Lake, a former local TV anchor, was running a long-shot race for the Republican gubernatorial primary when she impressed Trump at a Turning Point event in Phoenix. His fulsome endorsement helped catapult her to victory in a crowded primary. As The Post reported, she staffed her campaign with former Turning Point employees. .................. At a rally shortly before that year’s election, she asked, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!” ............... everyone she knows from McCain’s operation is a Harris supporter ........... Following Trump’s campaign stunt in Arlington National Cemetery in August, McCain’s youngest son, Jim McCain, both endorsed Harris and registered as a Democrat. ............ Seven thousand people attended a Harris rally in Chandler, outside Phoenix, on Thursday. Jill Biden visited, as did a bevy of pro-Harris celebrities, including Jennifer Garner, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close and Jessica Alba. Barack Obama is headed there this week. .............. The party’s MAGA-fueled erosion is perhaps most visible in the pitiful state of Lake’s campaign. Observers have started comparing her to Mark Robinson, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. The analogy feels a little unfair, given that Lake has never, at least to my knowledge, called herself a Nazi, expressed a wish to own slaves or fantasized about committing obscene acts with an in-law in the comments section of a porn site. But it gets at the depth of Lake’s reputational collapse................ Trump, who cares only for praise and fealty, has a natural affinity for grifters and fanatics. He elevates figures who share many of his faults but not his Mephistophelean charisma. .............. “There’s part of me that is pessimistic, that thinks that the Republican Party might be a lost cause,” said Giles. He wonders if a new conservative party could emerge. “Maybe we have three parties for a while in our country.
Three Weeks to Go, and That’s All Anyone Is Sure Of And it sends a smart political signal that she is not some crunchy-granola liberal who believes that guns are intrinsically evil. ......... In a perfect world, I’d ban handguns altogether. The chances that one stored in the home will be misused, often by kids with fatal results, are high. ........... I guess Harris’s enthusiasm for the Glock in her home might give her more credibility when it comes to banning assault weapons and requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, both of which she supports. ........... No signs that she’s going to be a sensational presidential conversationalist, but she seemed pleasant, well prepared and not nuts — unlike some candidates I could mention. .......... Have to admit I’m worried about the apparent lack of enthusiasm among Black and Hispanic men.......... A lot of voters, including me, fear she isn’t really up to the job, which could be the reason she’s mostly avoided tough interviews. ............. assuming that vision is more than just a list of wan liberal talking points and vague references to “my plan.” ............ I really don’t want to see Bernie Moreno as Ohio’s next senator. ......... Very pleased that Ruben Gallego, the Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona, appears well ahead in his race with the deeply strange Kari Lake, who still won’t concede that she lost the governor’s race two years ago. ............ controlling the weather is easy when you have the Rothschild space lasers near to hand. .......... But long term, I’ve never thought it was really fair to give the party that elected fewer senators the power to just close everything down. ............ the Senate’s role as a check on the often mindlessly majoritarian impulses of the House. ............. The other big idea in terms of fixing our institutions is a term-limited Supreme Court ......... I guess I don’t believe lifetime tenure is good for much of anything. Even the pope. ............. any change to court tenures should be accompanied by a requirement for the Senate that any court vacancy be filled within 60 days, to avoid the sort of mischief we saw around Merrick Garland’s nomination to nowhere in 2016. ......... I spent my early years living between two countries that never quite felt entirely my own, in my case Mexico and the United States. I’d like to think that by having our feet planted in two cultures, two languages, two traditions, we did more to enrich American life than detract from it — just as all immigrants to America do, whether they’re from Norway or Nigeria, Holland or Haiti.
