HandsHurtLoL

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has handed over power of attorney to her daughter, even as she remains in the U.S. Senate.

Feinstein has prompted concern if not outright alarm in recent years amid numerous mental lapses in the public eye. Earlier this year, she missed more than two months due to shingles. When she returned, a reporter asked Feinstein about her absence, but the senator’s response suggested she was unaware she had been away from Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Feinstein, 90, gave power of attorney to her daughter Katherine Feinstein, 66. The Times said Katherine is currently engaged in a nasty legal dispute with the three daughters of her mother’s late husband Richard Blum, who died in 2022:

In one legal dispute, the family is fighting over what’s described as Senator Feinstein’s desire to sell a beach house in an exclusive neighborhood in Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco. In another disagreement, the two factions are at odds over access to the proceeds of Mr. Blum’s life insurance, which Senator Feinstein says she needs to pay for her growing medical expenses.

[…]
Katherine Feinstein, 66, Senator Feinstein’s only child, who has power of attorney over her mother’s legal affairs, filed two lawsuits against Senator Feinstein’s co-trustees. The first lawsuit, over the beach house, says the property is in disrepair, that Senator Feinstein no longer wishes to use it, and that she wants to sell it this summer or fall.

Feinstein is not running for reelection in 2024, but she has rebuffed calls to resign from the Senate, which Democrats control 51 to 49. During her absence earlier this year, several of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees stalled in the Judiciary Committee, as Feinstein was not present to cast tie-breaking votes.

In an Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Feinstein began speaking about a defense spending bill at a time when she was simply supposed to cast a vote for or against the legislation. “Just say aye,” a fellow senator instructed her.

In May, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said Feinstein’s struggles are “painful to watch” and called on her to resign.

Estimated read time: 3 minutes

(Edited to add glossary of terms for labels.)

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@politics on kbin.social is a magazine to share and discuss current events news, opinion/analysis, videos, or other informative content related to politicians, politics, or policy-making at all levels of governance (federal, state, local), both domestic and international. Members of all political perspectives are welcome here, though we run a tight ship.

Community guidelines and submission rules were co-created between the Mod Team and early members of @politics. Please read all community guidelines and submission rules carefully before engaging our magazine.

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Hello @politics!

Estimated reading time: 2 min

Thank you for your patience with us as we compiled users' suggestions and coordinated between ourselves about verbiage to create our sidebar. We captured nearly everyone's suggestion, but we also had to compare notes about our own philosophies on moderation.

I have updated the sidebar for the magazine, and we officially have Community Guidelines and Submission Rules that were co-created between early members of this magazine and the Mod Team!

I hope that everyone who participates in our magazine sees themselves as being on the front line of moderation. If you see something that runs afoul of our rules, please use the report button. We have to rely on you to use the report button because:

I've started compiling some early data from the Way Back Machine as well as the statistics panel available to mods on kbin to look at the recent growth of our magazine. Our subscribers have almost doubled (delta +3255) since June 18, which was about a week after the first wave of the reddit migration to the Fediverse. Note that I am not able to view subscribers from other instances; this represents only the users on kbin.social!

The number of link submissions here has jumped from 86 total submissions on June 18 to 523 total submissions as of this posting. Looking at the federated stats for activity in this magazine, users have submitted between 10-25 articles a day nearly every day since we established our preliminary community guidelines a week ago. Comments/replies created in the magazine each day since the preliminary guidelines were posted have trended upward from 44 (7/15) to 231 (7/21). Again, this is activity per day.

I interpret this as an initial sign that we're creating a space where reasonable people can engage one another (a success, to be sure). But as I hope is evident, the activity here is already outpacing the ability for the Mods to be all up involved in every single conversation that may be unfolding here - let alone simultaneously occurring interactions. We also are all just volunteering, so none of us are planning to turn this into a job.

So please be part of the mod team in a significant way by reporting people who are violating our side bar rules. In short, if you put the trash in the bin, we will roll the bin out to the curb.

Thanks for being a part of our magazine!

Good day to everyone! Heads up: this post is going to be very long.

First off, I want to thank everyone who engaged in some hearty discussion in my mod post soliciting input for community guidelines, vision for the magazine, and submission rules. There were some different viewpoints discussed, but we all had space to express those viewpoints and some minds were even changed (namely, mine) about a few topics. I have to say that it gave me a ton of hope that we are going to make this an absolutely wonderful space to belong to on the Fediverse.

Based on that discussion, we as the mod team decided to add at least a few items to the side bar to establish community guidelines that had a lot of consensus. More community guidelines will be added later, but these topics were repeated by multiple community members enough times that it seemed important to make very clear statements as early as we could that civility is the goal of our magazine's engagement and that we will not tolerate hate speech/ trolling/disinformation/fascism parading as "politics."

If you're visiting our magazine from a mobile device, you may not see the side bar as prominently displayed as compared to using a tablet or computer/laptop. So I'm copy and pasting the guidelines here:

Preliminary @politics community guidelines until further notice

• Be civil. Don't know the difference between the various levels of debate until it descends into incivility? Refer to this graphic for details. Safe zone is everything above tone policing. Engage in too many occurrences of the lower three tiers, and you're likely to be banned.

• Post links to respected or reputable outlets of information. Need a definition of respected or reputable sources of news? Refer to this Media Bias Chart for details. Links to sources that rank in the 32.0-64.0 range on this graph will be permitted. Links to sources that rank lower will be removed.

• No neo-Nazi, fascist, or white supremacy sympathizers or content. We want to encourage community engagement from a variety of positions on the political spectrum. Nazism, fascism, and white supremacy are not political positions; they are postures of authoritarianism, which is inherently anti-democratic, and are methods of exerting control through bigotry and hate. No hate speech will be tolerated.

• Posts must be links to informative or educational content. Memes or links to screen shots/image captures will be removed. Submissions must link to either a news article, opinion/analysis writing, video, or other informative content that relates to politics, policy making, and politicians at all levels of governance both domestic and international. To reiterate: the source of this content must be from respected/reputable outlets.

Submission rules will be established within a week or two.

Thank you for being part of our magazine and helping to create a great community! Please start actively using the report button, but please allow your mod team a few hours to respond to reports.

-The @politics Mod Team

Additionally, all the mod team is up to snuff on how to use kbin's current moderator tools and we have caught up on the reports that have been made in the past 3-4 weeks. We have banned the worst contributors to this magazine already. Please make use of the report button whenever you feel the need for submission and comments! Just be aware that none of the mod team are making this work our full-time jobs, and we also are very involved contributors to other magazines. Please give us a few hours to address any reports that are filed.

What's next for @politics?

Next steps for us as the moderators:

• Sort through all the comments left in that first mod post and start unpacking some of the requests for community guidelines that didn't have clear consensus or were complex and need more qualifications/context. We need time to figure out if everything asked for can even be achieved through moderation in the first place, and then start ascribing consequences and actions that we are capable of following through with.

• Establish submission rules to the content shared here based on that first mod post. It is not our goal to get bogged down as moderators in the bureaucracy of a too-finely set of created submission rules, so please be aware that these rules will be meant to prevent @politics from becoming a cesspool; it's unlikely that these rules will be so stringent that we will start removing submissions for not using a colon in the right place in the title.

• Roll out badges (similar to submission flair from reddit) so that posters can indicate the characteristics of their post and add transparency to the content being shared. As of right now, the functionality of badges is limited, but I trust that this will become more useful in future kbin core updates. On Lemmy, it is possible to filter out posts based on badges, so our goal is to have this established as a culture here in kbin so we're ready for the day that a filter-by-badge feature is ready for use. Early stages on this, but here are the badges so far. Content: Election coverage, SCOTUS, International, Federal Government, State Government, Local Government. Media: Article, Video, YouTube. Slant: News, Opinion/Editorial, Discussion. When you create a thread, there is a text field for you to indicate one (or more? I'm unsure) of these badges.

• Roll out Discussion threads. The crowd was mixed on whether there should be special threads for users to discuss politics without sharing content alongside. I'm picturing a couple of options for this type of thread: 1. Posting philosophical or meta questions about politics to inspire lively and civil debate. 2. Sharing content that isn't breaking news but still educational/informative about politics. I'm thinking here posting an episode of a podcast that focuses on the history of political movements, or a video essayist on YouTube that traces the philosophical underpinnings of modern day politics.

What's next for the users of @politics?

We still need your help shaping the community here. Please add in your two cents about anything you've read above. What's currently on the screen and in the side bar is not set in stone. Keep in mind we're still compiling from the last big discussion, so just because you don't see your specific suggestion highlighted yet doesn't mean it's been ignored.

We now have to count on you heavily to use the report button. Again, the moderation is not likely to be instantaneous, but we won't let abusive commenters and awful content go unabated forever.

Also, we need to ask you to please start testing the badges feature. For now, you have to type in the badges (so I guess stay consistent with how they're labeled above), but I imagine that this would be a drop down menu in the future. Who knows! But give it a shot and let's see if it's working yet.

Next, we still need clarity from you about some questions.

• Do you want this magazine to only be U.S. politics, or is it okay for politics from other countries to be posted here? On that note, should it go without saying that all content must be in English?

• Do you want a Discussion-style thread in this magazine based on the description above? Would you want this style of thread if the description was tweaked?

• What should the consequences be for violating community guidelines? What should the consequences be for violating the submission rules?

• Would anyone like to volunteer to help with QoL issues in this magazine such as rebooting our magazine image? With CSS or JS design?

Thanks for reading this far, and I look forward to another terrific conversation here.

If the mod team I'm on wants to eventually build out, how do we add another moderator? I can easily see the delete button next to other mods on the [https://kbin.social/m/(magazine](https://kbin.social/m/(magazine) name)/moderators page, but I can't see anywhere to add new users.

Thanks for your help!

ETA - I found how to do it. For anyone else with this question, here's the solution:

1. Click on "Magazine Panel" button on right-hand nav bar from within the magazine you moderate.
2. Click "moderators" on top menu bar of the new page.
3. Enter in username of moderator and click "Add Moderator" button

Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB's username lol) and myself here in !politics.

First order of business is for you all to weigh in on the community guidelines that you would like to see here. As the mod team, we will weigh all suggestions and then add them to the side bar as magazine/community rules. I'm going to give about 48 hours for users to see this thread and add a comment or discuss.

Please know that the goal is not to create an echo chamber here in !politics, but we want to ensure that there is not an encroachment of rage bait and toxicity. It brings down the quality of the magazine and it discourages community engagement.

For the time being, the mod tools are pretty sparse, so I want to manage expectations about the scope of moderation we're able to do right now. For now, our touch will be light. Expect increased functionality as time progresses, though. We have 3 weeks of reports on file, so please know we see them. Give us some time to establish how to handle those before you start to see any movement.

https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/statement.html

Wanted to share this as a resource since I started doing a deep dive on the financial implications during one's retirement years of being a homemaker earlier today in light of a new law in Florida stopping the practice of lifetime alimony.

I have been joking to a couple of friends today who were also redditors that I've been feeling withdrawals from reddit throughout the day. Like I knew I was addicted, I just never thought I was going to have to face the consequences of withdrawals!

But there's also a major part of me that's feeling a sense of loss. I had two reddit accounts that were 11+ years old. I used an app called Redact last night to totally expunge my comment and submission history, and I just was hit by so many emotions watching my old content turn to ashes.

Reddit is where I always spent my depression spirals, but it was also where I found hobbyist communities and group help support. I found sexual partners through reddit, and used to even moderate in my early days. It's where I used to keep up with a TON of current events but also read from so many diverse perspectives with expertise on topics.

As much as I am tentatively excited for the culture and community we can build on kbin, I truly am feeling the inconsequential reality of all that karma and browsing. Reddit felt like it was going to be immortal, but even the mighty fall.

Anyone else bummed??