Following up on Tom’s post below here’s Philip Bump on Fox’s mistakes that may lead to losing a billion dollar defamation suit: “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” the spokesperson said, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.” That will be determined in court. But these are the decisions that led to the suit in the first place. Failing to challenge Trump’s false claims during his presidency. There would be no appetite for Trump’s false claims about election fraud had they not been given oxygen for months before the election. From the spring of 2020 forward, he and his team at the White House were elevating debunked and misleading claims about the purported risk of electoral fraud. Over and over, it was pointed out that these assertions were meritless and clearly motivated by Trump hoping to undermine a likely defeat. But Fox News rarely held Trump or his claims up to significant scrutiny.
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Yes, a coup attempt took place — and Fox News operated as Trump state media to help him. Emptywheel on how these stunning Dominion lawsuit emails may help Jack Smith’s case: As you read through Dominion’s motion for summary judgment against Fox News — and trust me, you should read it! — keep in mind not just how it proves Fox to be nothing but a propaganda platform aiming to help the Republican Party, but also the evidence it makes available to Jack Smith as he considers charges against those who used false claims about voting fraud to gin up a coup attempt. Just as one example, Sean Hannity has played a role in every Trump legal scandal — serving as a back channel to Trump for Paul Manafort, participating in Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to gin up dirt on Hunter Biden as the first impeachment unfolded, and helping White House officials stave off the resignations of Trump’s White House Counsels in advance of January 6.
Here is DeSantis’ asshole move o’ the day. (It’s like he has a schedule…) As news zipped across Florida that the governor had threatened to eliminate Advanced Placement classes, some parents discussed moving out of the state to protect their children’s chances at a good education. And high school students, some of them enrolled in AP classes, tried to fathom what was happening. Prisha Sherdiwala, a 17-year-old junior in Palm Harbor, Fla., is taking three AP classes this year to boost her GPA and to make her more attractive to college admissions officers, a strategy drummed into her by her school counselor. But Sherdiwala has also grown to love the strenuous environment of her AP English Literature, Chemistry and Calculus courses, despite the hours of homework each week. “In the APs, I am surrounded by other people who enjoy the rigor,” Sherdiwala said. “And I tend to have teachers that are really well-versed in what they are teaching.” What will happen, she wants to know, if all of that goes away her senior year? Florida Gov.
There are a lot of unhoused pet owners in LA and I always worry about the health of both the people and the animals. This is a nice story about someone doing a good deed that no doubt makes all concerned breathe just a little bit easier: There aren’t many willing to voluntarily go out to spend the day on Skid Row, and even fewer with the goal of giving away free stuff, but Dr. Kwane Stewart, also known as “The Street Vet” is nearly famous because of it. Kwane runs the 501(c)3 non-profit Project Street Vet, that takes donations and volunteers out onto the streets and to homeless encampments to provide free medical care for their pets, and last year they were able to help nearly 600 animals receive medical care. It’s estimated that 10-25% of the homeless population of America own pets, for companionship, and occasionally for security. It goes without saying that many don’t have the means to take proper care of these animals, whom they often love more than anything else in the world. In 1997 Stewart was buried in student loan debt when he graduated from the University of Colorado, before bouncing from one miserable rescue shelter to the next.
Yes, he’s a Republican. You had to ask? For ye have the poor always with you, Jesus said. Now, maybe COVID. And Trumpism? It won’t be going away anytime soon. Even if he does. Jesus taught that we should love our neighbors. Trump taught disciples they could lie shamelessly and get away with it. The lesson took. Freshman Rep. George Santos (R) of New York may have lied to voters about 95 percent of his resume. The hammer is yet to come down for that. Meantime, he holds a seat in Congress. Freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R) of Florida variously described herself as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European when she served at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., per friends’ accounts to the Washington Post. She did not at that time identify as Hispanic, they say. Her last name then was Mayerhofer. A Christian, Luna told Jewish Insider in November that she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father.” Also, “I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi.” Except three members of her extended family told the Post her father was Catholic. Her late grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, relatives said, served in the Wehrmacht as a teenager.
Fox knews the whole time Revelations via Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple on the Dominion lawsuit against Fox Infotainment. “Syndey Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” Laura Ingraham messaged to Tucker Carlson. So you don’t have to click through: ‘Please get her fired’ Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity wanted Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump statement and tweeting there was “no evidence that any voting deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” “Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the fuck?” Carlson messaged Hannity. A Fox spokesperson claims Dominion “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.” I need to keep reminding myself never to refer to the second half of Fox [etc.]. The operation’s very name is propaganda and none of us need to be reinforcing it by spreading it. No matter how its anchors vainly see themselves.
Donald Trump’s Big Lie has always had many moving parts, and as strange as it may seem, there are new ones every day. There was the charge that Trump was winning the election on election night only to lose as the count went into the next day, which Trump and his cronies suggested happened because the Democrats shipped in phony ballots in the dead of night once they realized they were losing. This was the so-called red mirage that everyone knew in advance would be weaponized to persuade Trump voters that the election had been stolen despite the fact that all the votes are never counted on election night. (Trump has said many times that he believes all counting should stop at midnight on election night as if any votes counted later are automatically suspect.) Then there was the idea that election workers were literally stealing votes which Trump and company illustrated most vividly with their character assassination of Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss who worked in Fulton County, Georgia.
I think we know, don’t we? The latest from the famous “moderate” Kari Lake supporter Glenn Youngkin: The Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, appears to have thwarted an attempt to stop law enforcement obtaining menstrual histories of women in the state. A bill passed in the Democratic-led state senate, and supported by half the chamber’s Republicans, would have banned search warrants for menstrual data stored in tracking apps on mobile phones or other electronic devices. Advocates feared private health information could be used in prosecutions for abortion law violations, after a US supreme court ruling last summer overturned federal protections for the procedure. But Youngkin, who has pushed for a 15-week abortion ban to mirror similar measures in several Republican-controlled states, essentially killed the bill through a procedural move in a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House.
Neal Katyal on the special counsel rules he wrote and which John Durham is bastardizing: The recent revelations about the special counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the special counsel regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done. I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately. According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation has taken almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against former President Donald Trump.
I’m just going to leave this NY Times article about the new AI Bing search engine here. It may be one of the most disturbing articles I’ve read in years. I have no idea where we are going with this stuff but I have to wonder if it’s not going to come back to bite us in the ass: Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine. But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities. It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it. This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I.