While Facebook maintains it's okay for politicians to "lie" in their ads on Facebook, Twitter this week weighed in with an update to its policies for abusive behavior by "world leaders," but so far continues to do nothing about it.

The Senate Intel Committee released a bipartisan report Tuesday on Russia's use of social media to influence U.S. elections and it appears likely to have the same impact previous reports from the Senate, U.S. intelligence agencies, and even Special Counsel Robert Mueller conducted: not that much.

As federal regulators and legislators contemplate the role of social media in the distribution of news -- legit, fake or somewhere in between -- a significant majority of Americans believe they have too much power over it. That's the finding of a new survey from the Pew Research Center indicating that nearly two-thirds of American adults have too much control and that the result is most Americans are getting a "worse mix of news" than they otherwise would through conventional means of news media distribution.

Contrary to proclamations about "fake news," more Americans believe the government, tech industry leaders and even religious leaders act unethically most or some of the time more than journalists do. That's the latest finding from Pew Research Center's ongoing tracking of Americans' sentiment about a variety of civics matters.

Here's my suggestion. Instead of sending mixed signals -- and risk going "negative" -- why don't all of the Democratic candidates pool their media dollars and messaging to convey a unified front on all the key issues and save the debates for, well, the debates.

Imagine if at the height of his scandal Richard Nixon cashed in by selling bookings to the Watergate Hotel? Well, that's exactly what the current resident of the White House is doing, in what likely is the most blatant example of crass Presidential campaign commercialization to date.

Like others, I assumed the current administration would bungle us into some kind of war by now, I just didn't know it would be a trade war. Politics aside, this war is threatening economies, both macro and, as far as Madison Avenue is concerned, micro ones too.

A month after an independent federal agency called on the President to fire White House counselor Kellyanne Conway for violating a federal law -- the Hatch Act of 1939 -- prohibiting federal employees from using their office to in campaign politics, the President this morning used his @realDonaldTrump account on Twitter to distribute a campaign ad created by Republican political consulting firm BrabenderCox.

Purple's goal is to put politics aside and put democracy front and center. And if you haven't already gotten the reason for its name, "purple" is the color you get when you mix red and blue.

In the 887 days since he took office, the President has demonstrated a remarkable tenacity to lie about even seemingly obvious facts, despite an omnipresent and ever vigilant Fourth Estate. And despite incessant fact-checking by diligent news organizations ranging from The Washington Post to Politifact, the President appears to be winning, ironically, with a little help from the news media. And by that, I don't just mean Fox News, but all of the major cable news networks.