Ted Cruz

New York has become the first state in the country to ban gas hook-ups in new buildings. A section of the state’s recently passed, long-delayed 2024 budget includes a policy known as the All Electric Buildings Act. Under the law, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, New York is headed for a climate-friendlier future.Republicans Create Culture War Over… Stoves The legislation follows a rise in restrictions on gas in buildings nationwide but is historic in its scale and scope. Its impacts could reverberate far…

Last year, I wrote about how West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin was acting like a bad boyfriend to the Democratic party. The man was stringing his colleagues along for months and holding climate legislation in limbo. I ate my words just a couple of weeks later when Manchin worked with Democratic leadership to revive the corpse of the Build Back Better Act. In helping to pass the U.S.’s most aggressive (and only) climate legislation to date, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Manchin helped make climate history. Now, it…

Last week, the right-wing social network Parler was sold to a media conglomerate called Starboard. The company shut Parler down indefinitely to “undergo a strategic assessment.” It marks the end of a long and tumultuous saga for the conservative social media company—once seen as a refuge from mainstream apps like Twitter—including a botched deal with the Nazi sympathizer formerly known as Kanye West, ties to domestic terrorism, and temporary banishment from the app stores. In a conversation with Gizmodo, Starboard CEO…

Matt Taibbi, one of the “Twitter Files” reporters selected by Elon Musk himself, no longer tweets. Instead, the journalist once-hell bent on holding Wall Street to task, now “truths” on Donald Trump-affiliated social platform, Truth Social.Mr. Tweet Fumbles Super Bowl TweetIn the fallout of Elon Musk’s alleged suppression of Substack links on Twitter, the Twitter Files reporter implied his departure from Musk’s platform in an April 7 post. “I’m obviously staying at Substack, and will be moving to Substack Notes next…

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite (AP)With calls for a national ban against TikTok growing more and more common by the week, particularly in Congress, it’s never been a tougher time to be a lawmaker publicly supporting the app. Still, a vocal minority of House and Senate Democrats—no Republicans—are defying those calls and doing so on the platform despite recent federal laws barring the app on government devices.The few politicians willing to stick their necks out on the short-form video app overwhelmingly come from one party.…

Ted Cruz during a Senate hearing on February 9, 2023. Photo: Mariam Zuhaib (AP)NASA is set to reveal the names of four astronauts who will fly around the Moon as part of the Artemis 2 mission. But first, we’ll have to endure a speech from Ted Cruz during the Houston-based event.Better Mobility & Cameras: NASA & Axiom's New Spacesuits | TechmodoTexas Congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee and Lizzie Fletcher will join Cruz at the unveiling, Click2Houston reports. The U.S. politicians will be accompanied by…

A powerful and bizarre coalition of Senators have teamed up on a bill that could strike down the digital ad dominance of Google and Meta, though the proposed legislation never mentions those companies by name. The AMERICA Act could radically transform advertising technology, the financial backbone of the internet.Google’s Antitrust Case Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to AITry to say the bill’s title in one breath: The Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability Act, aka the AMERICA…

Last year, Elon Musk changed Twitter’s verified program from a quasi-signal that a user is notable to a pay-for-checkmark $8 free-for-all. Immediately, trolls and comedians seized on the opportunity, making verified fake accounts for politicians, reminding people of Chiquita Banana’s involvement in genocide, and arranging a pretend, but disgusting, conversation between Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz.The most significant fallout, though, came with a tweet from a user pretending to be drug manufacturer Eli Lily. After the user…

California lawmakers introduced new legislation this week aimed at pressuring tech companies like Google and Facebook into paying news publishers for content posted on their platforms. The measure comes amid a brewing battle between tech firms and lawmakers over similar legislation in Canada and on the heels of a messy fight over news last year between the Australian government and Facebook. Now, the fight over who pays for the news is coming to the Golden State.The proposed bill, dubbed the California Journalism…

Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images)The Supreme Court’s ruling on a pair of ISIS terrorism cases this week will rest on the nine justices’ interpretation of 26 words written in 1996 that collectively have come to define the nature and scope of modern online expression. The ruling could fundamentally alter the types of content social companies are held legally liable for and couldforce them to re-examine the ways they use recommendation algorithms to serve users content. Though that sounds esoteric, tech companies being…