I’ve been appalled recently by the number of arrests of sexual predators of children down here and in surrounding states that are attached to churches as either Pastors or Youth Ministers. There has also been appalling news about the social media behavior of the Lt. Governor of Tennessee and the resurrection of a child marriage bill in the West Virginia Senate. You get a pretty clear picture of who the child predators are in this country if you do any research in the area.
As one of the top politicians in deep-red Tennessee, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R) has joined the anti-LGBTQ+ wave sweeping the Republican Party. With McNally as the head of the state Senate, Tennessee passed bills earlier this year banning transgender children from receiving gender-affirming care and outlawing drag performances from many public spaces.
But on Instagram, McNally takes a more encouraging tone towards at least one LGBTQ youth—leaving heart emojis and other compliments on raunchy photos of an aspiring 20-year-old Tennessee performer, including one close-up shot of the man’s butt.
McNally’s Instagram comments, which were first reported by digital news site The Tennessee Holler, were left on the page of Knoxville native Franklyn McClur.
In November, for example, McClur posted an entirely nude picture that only narrowly avoided showing his penis.
“Great picture, Finn!” McNally commented, referencing McClur’s nickname. “Best wishes for continued health and happiness.
Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, in an exclusive interview Thursday, apologized after the uproar over his interactions with provocative posts on social media, while insisting that his intentions have been misconstrued.
“I’m really, really sorry if I’ve embarrassed my family, embarrassed my friends, embarrassed any of the members of the legislature with the posts,” McNally told NewsChannel 5 Investigates. “It was not my intent to [embarrass them] and not my intent to hurt them.”
The 79-year-old East Tennessee Republican — who has presided over a legislative session defined by bills outlawing drag shows in public places and targeting gender care for the trans community — found himself facing accusations of hypocrisy after a progressive site, the Tennessee Holler, unearthed his social media interactions with a 20-year-old gay model.
Among them: provocative Instagram posts that were liked by McNally from his official account, including one where the young man doesn’t appear to be wearing clothes.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked McNally, “When people see these posts, what should they take away from them?”
“Well,” he answered, “I don’t know that they should take away a whole lot.”
In the interview, McNally described how he befriended the young man, first on Facebook, then on Instagram.
Among the posts: a close-up of the young man’s underwear-covered backside.
McNally responded with three red hearts and three “on-fire” emojis, along with the comment: “Finn, you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine.”
The lieutenant governor’s explanation?
“It’s that, you know, I, you know, try to encourage people with posts and try to, you know, help them if I can,” McNally said.
A bill to prohibit minors from getting married in West Virginia was resurrected in the state Senate on Thursday, a day after its defeat in a committee.
The about-face didn’t necessarily give the bill a clear path to passage. Several senators gave impassioned speeches after the bill was brought back, some of whom defended the right of teenagers in love to marry.
The House of Delegates passed the bill last week. The Senate Judiciary Committee narrowly rejected it Wednesday night without debate. Republican Sen. Charles Trump of Morgan County, a committee member, made a motion that was adopted by the full Senate Thursday to withdraw the bill from the committee and give it a second reading. It will be up for a final reading Friday, and the Senate will have the right to amend the bill.
Currently, children can marry as young as 16 in West Virginia with parental consent. Anyone younger than that also must get a judge’s waiver.
The bill’s main sponsor, Democratic Del. Kayla Young of Kanawha County, has said that since 2000 there have been more than 3,600 marriages in the state involving one or more children.
Cabell County Democratic Sen. Mike Woelfel, an attorney, said he represented a girl who got both married and divorced when she was in the eighth grade. Woelfel said he was concerned about older men who court young girls “and the next thing you know, some young girl has convinced her parents to let her get married.”
Frozen human embryos can legally be considered property, or “chattel,” a Virginia judge has ruled, basing his decision in part on a 19th century law governing the treatment of slaves.
The preliminary opinion by Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Richard Gardiner – delivered in a long-running dispute between a divorced husband and wife – is being criticized by some for wrongly and unnecessarily delving into a time in Virginia history when it was legally permissible to own human beings.
“It’s repulsive and it’s morally repugnant,” said Susan Crockin, a lawyer and scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an expert in reproductive technology law.
Solomon Ashby, president of the Old Dominion Bar Association, a professional organization made up primarily of African American lawyers, called Gardiner’s ruling troubling.
“I would like to think that the bench and the bar would be seeking more modern precedent,” he said.
Gardiner did not return a call to his chambers Wednesday. His decision, issued last month, is not final: He has not yet ruled on other arguments in the case involving Honeyhline and Jason Heidemann, a divorced couple fighting over two frozen embryos that remain in storage.
Honeyhline Heidemann, 45, wants to use the embryos. Jason Heidemann objects.
Initially, Gardiner sided with Jason Heidemann. The law at the heart of the case governs how to divide “goods and chattels.” The judge ruled that because embryos could not be bought or sold, they couldn’t be considered as such and therefore Honeyhline Heidemann had no recourse under that law to claim custody of them.
But after the ex-wife’s lawyer, Adam Kronfeld, asked the judge to reconsider, Gardiner conducted a deep dive into the history of the law. He found that before the Civil War, it also applied to slaves. The judge then researched old rulings that governed custody disputes involving slaves, and said he found parallels that forced him to reconsider whether the law should apply to embryos.
Country Garden with Crucifix, 1911 by Gustav Klimt
Former President Donald Trump cannot keep E. Jean Carroll from showing a jury the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that nearly derailed his 2016 campaign in a lawsuit accusing him of rape, a federal judge ruled.
“In this case, a jury reasonably could find, even from the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape alone, that Mr. Trump admitted in the Access Hollywood tape that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so,” Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in a 23-page memorandum opinion.
Carroll has filed two lawsuits against the former president: one accusing him of defaming her in responding to her sexual assault allegations by telling reporters “she’s not my type,” and another confronting the sexual battery allegations directly under New York’s recently passed Adult Survivors Act.
In the mid-1990s, Carroll claims, Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman. Trial on the allegations is slated for April.
As the parties prepare their cases for a jury, Kaplan issued a ruling hashing out what evidence they can see and hear. Trump has argued that the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he can be heard boasting to Billy Bush about grabbing women “by the p—-,” is inadmissible propensity evidence.
We should be far enough along in civilization to stop thinking boys will be boys and to stop projecting our bad behavior on others. These things are clearly issues because the patriarchy wants them. The louder a group of white christianist men scream about bad behavior, the more likely they are perpetrators.
Sorry for the Triggering Topic today, but sometimes a dark rabbit hole needs some light.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Fox News-Dominion lawsuit and the Tucker Carlson-Kevin McCarthy effort to paint January 6 as a tourist visit are still getting the most attention in today’s political news. I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized after a fall last night. McConnell is 81.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been hospitalized following a fall at a hotel in Washington, his spokesman said late Wednesday.
The 81-year-old senator was attending a private dinner at a local hotel when he tripped, spokesman David Popp said in a statement. “He has been admitted to the hospital where he is receiving treatment,” he added, without providing any further details on his condition.
McConnell, who is serving his seventh six-year term in the Senate, became GOP leader in 2007. He has held the post for longer than any other Republican and for years has been among the most powerful elected officials in Washington.
He previously underwent surgery following a serious fall in August 2019, when he fractured his shoulder after tripping outside his Louisville home. The procedure kept him out of the public eye for weeks as he spent the congressional break recovering at home and undergoing physical therapy.
The senator, who overcame polio as a child, also has a history of heart issues and underwent triple bypass surgery in 2003, just after being promoted to the No. 2 Senate Republican post.
“I think no regular person could read this and look at Fox like a news organization at this point.”
In the wake of bombshell legal filings showing that Fox News executives and stars seemingly sought to pacify their disgruntled MAGA viewers by airing election lies, while punishing and censoring the employees attempting to deliver the actual truth, the above observation has become commonplace within media circles.
Pierre Auguste Renoir, By the Water or Near the Lake 1880
But some of the shots are being fired from within the conservative cable giant.
According to nine Fox News staffers and insiders, the pre-trial filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News further impugn and sully the reputation of the network’s “straight news” journalists, especially since they show Fox was “operating out of fear” over losing viewers to smaller right-wing competitors following its Decision Desk’s early (and accurate) Arizona election night call for President Joe Biden.
“We are not happy,” one reporter told The Daily Beast.
At the same time, five sources familiar with the situation say that despite the very public reputational harm resulting from the Dominion documents, the news side has been kept in the dark on the filings, with no communication from Fox’s corporate management or human resources department.
“It’s just a really bad time to be working here,” one news producer said.
The prime time entertainment stars have waged war on the “journalists,” despite the fact that everyone from Rupert Murdoch down knew that Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen were complete nonsence.
More than anything, the tranche of internal messages and texts Dominion obtained from Fox executives, hosts, and producers show a network in full-blown crisis over the fear of losing its relevance within the conservative movement—and a network whose top stars loathed the fact-driven journalists on the “hard news” side.Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox empire, privately conceded that Trump’s claims were “really crazy stuff,” and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned shortly after the election that they shouldn’t “give the crazies an inch.”
Even stars like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham privately trash-talked Team Trump’s “insane” fraud claims. But despite all that, the Fox hosts were simultaneously boosting them on the network’s airwaves in the days and weeks after the election.
More than anything, the tranche of internal messages and texts Dominion obtained from Fox executives, hosts, and producers show a network in full-blown crisis over the fear of losing its relevance within the conservative movement—and a network whose top stars loathed the fact-driven journalists on the “hard news” side.Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox empire, privately conceded that Trump’s claims were “really crazy stuff,” and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned shortly after the election that they shouldn’t “give the crazies an inch.”
Even stars like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham privately trash-talked Team Trump’s “insane” fraud claims. But despite all that, the Fox hosts were simultaneously boosting them on the network’s airwaves in the days and weeks after the election.
Other hard news Fox hosts such as Neil Cavuto and Leland Vittert also found themselves in the crosshairs for pushing “anti-Trump” narratives in the days following the election.
There’s much more on the “news” vs. entertainment war at the link above.
Stelter writes that Fox has been holding workshops for its employees on libel law, including the concept of “actual malice.”
Insiders say the workshops have happened for years. Indeed, legal refreshers are routine at major media companies—make sure you ask for comment, choose your adjectives carefully, attribute incendiary claims. But there is nothing routine about this moment in Fox News history. Every new legal filing in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit sets off a wave of coverage, criticism, and mockery, from the front page of The New York Times to the cold open of Saturday Night Live. More revelations came Tuesday, including Tucker Carlsonsaying of Donald Trump, “I hate him passionately,” and Rupert Murdoch saying “I hate our Decision Desk people”—the ones who accurately projected that Joe Biden had beat Trump.
From a corporate HR standpoint, some of the most destabilizing texts show Fox’s most powerful opinion hosts—Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham—dumping on their colleagues on the “news” side. New court filings show the opinion hosts derided numerous Fox reporters by name. “We thought they hated us,” one correspondent said, “but now we know it in their own words.”
For the people caught up in the case, whose private messages are being exposed and ridiculed, the process is “excruciating,” an on-air personality said. However, they have had months to prepare for this moment, since the discovery procedures and depositions ate up much of last year.
A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment on Vanity Fair’s reporting about the recent legal training classes—or whether stars like Hannity had to participate. But in a statement Tuesday about the new filings, Fox accused Dominion of distorting the truth “in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.”
Such official dismissals aren’t shutting down the chatter inside Fox, though employees are cautious about when and where they gossip about the latest cache of private exchanges made public. “We’re very careful when we’re miked up,” said the on-air personality. “And we’re not texting about it.” Half a dozen Fox employees found other ways to share insights for this story. All were granted anonymity because they would never be allowed to address such a sensitive subject on the record. Even the network’s own media analyst, Howard Kurtz,has been muzzled: He disclosed on February 27 that “the company has decided that as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now.”
Again, you can read much more about the internal war at the network at the Vanity Fair link.
There’s also a battle raging between Fox News and Donald Trump.
Donald Trump got a tip-off on Saturday that the Fox News Channel would be taking his Conservative Political Action Conference speech live, a switch from the network’s largely indifferent posture toward the former president since he helped send it into crisis after the 2020 election.
Piet Mondrian, Amaryllis, 1910
Trump decided he could not pass up the opportunity to send a message.
“I hope Fox doesn’t turn off, but we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016,” he said in an apparent reference to the false election claims that were at the center of many of the network’s controversies, including a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News that has led to a massive release of internal company documents.
It was just another volley in a low-grade war — some of it public, much of it hidden — that has emerged as one of the defining dynamics in the Republican Party as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway. Trump’s advisers see in Fox News leadership a clear adversary in their march back to the White House and have sought to foster a divide between executives and “the brave and patriotic” opinion hosts with whom he continues to have relationships.
Trump attacked Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch by name this month, calling him and his executives a “group of MAGA hating Globalist RINOS” who are “aiding & abetting the destruction of America.” Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. — noting that he had not been invited on the network in six months — accused Fox News leaders last week of harboring an “America Last, war forever, garbage, fold-to-the-Democrats agenda.” Other allies, such as Stephen K. Bannon, have shredded the network in public.
Documents uncovered by ongoing litigation have also revealed the extent of the ongoing hostility toward Trump from Murdoch and other top executives, both before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Fox News boss emailed a former company executive in early 2021 that the goal was “to make Trump a non person.” Fox News board member Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, told another Fox executive around the same time that he had communicated to both Rupert Murdoch and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch that there was a “huge inflection point to keep Trump down and move on.”
Good luck with that. Trump is never going to stop making trouble for all of us until he finally kicks the bucket.
It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network. The viewers believed Mr. Trump’s claims that a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud was behind his loss. And as Mr. Carlson’s nightly 8 p.m. hour approached, the host pushed his producers to give the viewers what they wanted.
He demanded examples of dead people voting in Nevada or Georgia, even offering to call the Trump campaign personally to ask for help. That night, he trumpeted the evidence, borrowed from a Trump campaign news release: Four allegedly dead Georgians had cast ballots. Within days, though, the campaign’s spoon-fed examples began to fall apart. Three of the dead Georgians were actually alive. And Mr. Carlson was forced to partly retract his allegations, while insisting to viewers that “a whole bunch of dead people did vote.”
Alfred_Sisley, The Small Meadows in Spring
Mr. Carlson’s frantic effort to appease angry Fox viewers, revealed in texts and emails released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, underscore the central quandary faced both by Fox and the Republican Party in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat and still today, as the former president mounts another campaign for the White House.
Like the Republican Party more broadly, Fox wants and needs the support of Trump fans, who both dominate party primaries and form the core of Fox’s viewership. And like the party, Fox has found it difficult to quit Mr. Trump even as his manic efforts to relitigate his defeat have hobbled the party in subsequent elections.
Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.
This is one of those long, gossipy articles, mostly focusing on Tucker Carlson. Read the rest at the NYT.
Mere hours after Tucker Carlson’s latest segment minimizing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, House Republicans were eager to change the subject from the Fox News host’s riot revisionism.
While Carlson continued to roil Washington, many GOP lawmakers who gathered Wednesday morning were celebrating their unexpected win on a bill rolling back progressive D.C. crime laws and plotting their response to Thursday’s White House budget.
Carlson didn’t come up at all during House Republicans’ meeting, according to four members in the room who spoke on condition of anonymity. And not a single GOP lawmaker asked about it when given the chance to speak. In fact, some members were privately surprised by the amiability of this week’s first closed-door huddle — generally because there is usually some drama, but particularly since the Fox News segment has publicly reopened painful cross-party fissures over Jan. 6, 2021.
Yet Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to let Carlson access thousands of hours of Capitol footage from the riot has left a lingering cloud over his own leadership team, which was repeatedly pressed about the move as Carlson continues to downplay the violence of the siege by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Senate Republicans heaped criticism Tuesday on Carlson’s portrayal of the riot, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (though few directly dinged McCarthy).
“It seems like some in the press want to talk about Jan 6 every day. So do Democrats. They only want to talk about certain parts of it, though,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters during a press conference where every question focused on the Fox News footage.
A Republican-controlled House committee launched an inquiry Wednesday into the Democratic-controlled Jan. 6 committee, which a staff member said will review whether pertinent information about the riot was omitted from the high-profile examination of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Many House Republicans were vocal critics since the creation of the Jan. 6 committee, and the inquiry seems to make good on lawmaker campaign trail vows to investigate the investigators.
The House Administration’s subcommittee on oversight will be combing through the massive amount of records collected by the Jan. 6 committee, which was dissolved in January, said the staffer, with the goal of analyzing how the panel conducted the investigation….
The subcommittee — made up of four Republicans and two Democrats — will be looking into roughly two million documents and records, the source said, which the House Administration Committee obtained from the House Rules Committee after the Jan. 6 panel was dissolved.
The subcommittee will be led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., a Trump ally who had his own run-in with the Jan. 6 committee. The panel accused Loudermilk of giving tours of the Capitol in the days leading up to the riot.
Video footage showed Loudermilk guiding a tour of House office buildings during a time when the complex was closed off to visitors because of pandemic restrictions. Loudermilk has strenuously denied that the group he was leading was using the tour to inspect the facility ahead of the riot.
I suspect this “investigation” will be about as successful as Jim Jordan’s “weaponization of government” subcommittee.
Weeks before the 2020 election, a secret 87-page document outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump’s still-to-come campaign of election denial. The private paper — the existence of which has not been reported before — forecast with chilling confidence the likelihood of violence during the presidential handover and proposed a far-reaching set of political reforms to thwart Trumpism in the future.
Americans remember that dark winter well. But the impetus for structural change has faded, even among Democrats who still privately seethe about the country’s broken political system — and fear an uglier meltdown could come in 2024 or beyond.
The report carried a plain title: Plan D. Reading it, I wondered if the D stood for “doomsday.”
Actually, the letter was not a cipher. Plan D was the fourth of several studies organized by an opaque advocacy group, known as the Hub, to prepare for the depredations of the Trump era. The Hub is known in Washington for its sophisticated dark-money interventions in electoral politics. During the 2020 campaign, it also gathered up strategists, lawyers and activists to draft plans for a different kind of conflict.
The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”
Plan D is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue— defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures.
Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, “layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.” It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated.
“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”
I’ve been reading news for the past few hours, and I’m feeling a sense of unreality–not quite depersonalization, but something similar. Will this country ever return to something resembling sanity? I’m beginning to doubt it. I opened Twitter today to see Elon Musk mocking and defaming a disabled Twitter employee who had been locked out but could not get anyone in the company to tell him whether he had been laid off or fired, and if so, when he would be paid what he was owed.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk sank to a new low on Monday night when he laughed at employee Haraldur Thorleifsson, who tweeted at him to ask whether he had been affected by the company’s recent layoffs. Throughout the course of their conversation on Twitter, Thorleifsson confirmed the worst: His days at Twitter were over.
Thorleifsson, founder of Ueno, a digital agency acquired by Twitter in 2021, found himself caught in a Musk-produced chaos a little more than a week ago, when he suddenly lost access to his work computer. The Ueno founder stated that he asked Twitter’s human resources department whether he still had a job but was told they didn’t know. After emailing Musk himself to no avail, Thorleifsson decided to do the next best thing. He tweeted at the Twitter CEO.
“Dear @elonmusk 👋 9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees,” Thorleifsson said on Monday afternoon. “However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve ot answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?” [….]
Thorleifsson’s tweet received tens of thousands of retweets and likes and succeeded in capturing Musk’s attention, which experience has shown us can lead to either good or bad things. The Platformer newsletter reported that the Twitter CEO was “furious” after an engineer broke links and images on Twitter on Monday morning, so it’s safe to assume that the chief twit was not having a good day.
Musk started by asking Thorleifsson, who is based in Iceland, what kind of work he had been doing. Thorleifsson stated that he couldn’t discuss that publicly on Twitter without prior approval from Musk’s lawyers, which Musk waved off, giving him permission in a tweet. The employee went on to list a number of things he was responsible for at the company, including heading the effort to save $500,000 on a SaaS contract, leading critiques to level up design across the company, serving as the hiring manager for all design roles, and prioritizing design projects to accommodate Twitter’s smaller team.
A notorious micromanager, Musk proceeded to ask for more details and then responded to Thorleifsson with two “🤣 🤣” emojis….
In a follow up tweet, Musk bombarded Thorleifsson with questions and demanded pictures of the employee’s work….
Thorleifsson told Musk that he couldn’t provide pics or docs because Twitter had locked his computer, adding that he could provide documentation if Musk restored his access to the device. After talking to Musk for about an hour, Thorleifsson tweeted that Twitter human resources had “miraculously” replied to confirm that he no longer worked at the company.
Musk, meanwhile, apparently unsatisfied with laughing at a former employee, decided to trash talk Thorleifsson hours after their exchange. The Twitter CEO cast doubt on Thorleifsson’s disability—he suffers from a type of muscular dystrophy called dystrophinopathy—and said he couldn’t have been fired since he didn’t work.
It was pretty clear in the exchange, which you can read on Twitter, that Musk did not even comprehend Halli’s description of his work for Twitter or that Twitter had bought out Halli’s design company and still owed him money.
Just realized Elon Musk doesn’t know Figma is a real company and probably thought the dude was doing a Figma Balls joke. This dude has fried his brain on internet memes https://t.co/lmRs4SGkoV
Thorleifsson responded to Musk’s cruel comments about his performance on Tuesday morning. After pointing out that Musk was revealing confidential health information, he explained the effects muscle dystrophy has on his body. Thorleifsson shared that he started using a wheelchair when he was 25 years old and today needs help to get in and out of bed and use the toilet.
Addressing Musk’s comments about his hands, Thorleifsson said he had told HR that he was unable to do manual work for extended periods of time, but can write for one or two hours at a time.
“This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical guidance,” Thorleifsson stated. “I’m typing this on my phone btw. It’s easier for because I only need to use one finger.” [….]
Here’s a photo of Thorleifsson:
Hello new friends!
You don't have to like me but I think you're pretty great.
The Iceland-based entrepreneur had sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency, to Twitter in early 2021 – after founding the firm in Reykjavik in 2014.
As part of the acquisition he became a full-time employee at Twitter.
“I decided to sell for a few reasons but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly but surely failing me,” he told the BBC.
“I have a few good work years left in me so this was a way to wrap up my company, and set up myself and my family for years when I won’t be able to do as much.”
Mr Thorleifsson is worried that Mr Musk will not honour the contract he signed with Twitter when he sold them his company.
“This is extremely stressful. This is my retirement fund, a way to take care of myself and my family as my disease progresses. Having the richest man in the world on the other end of this, potentially refusing to stand by contracts is not easy for me to accept,” he said.
Last month, Elon Musk appeared to fire another 200 Twitter employees. It means that Twitter now has just over 2,000 workers – down from approximately 7,500 in October.“Companies let people go, that’s within their rights,” Mr Thorleifsson said. “They usually tell people about it but that’s seemingly the optional part at Twitter now”.
I’ve probably spent too much time on this story, but I’m really having a hard time dealing with the fact that an ignorant psychopath like Musk has as much power as he does. Fortunately, he’s revealing his psychopathology to the world now, and perhaps that will bring him down a few pegs. On the other hand, it appears his fellow psychopath Donald Trump is never going to go away so maybe I’m just delusional.
And now, more Twitter tales:
For all followers today:
– How a single engineer brought down Twitter on Monday – The high cost of cutting expenses – Good tweet about tax seasonhttps://t.co/5kIDQeTxXO
On Monday morning, Twitter users logged on to find a thicket of connected issues. Clicking on links would no longer open them; instead, users would see a mysterious error message reporting that “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Images stopped loading as well. Other users reported that they could not access TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client for professional users.
Chaos took over the timeline, as users tweeted vociferously about the outage — often illustrating their points with images that no one could see, because they wouldn’t load.
In a tweet, the company offered the vaguest of explanations for what was happening.
“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company’s support account tweeted. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”
API stands for “Application Platform Interface.” Twitter has previously allowed researchers, developers, and other applications free access to Twitter’s API. Now they will have to pay for the privilege. From Endgaget:
Of all the once-unthinkable changes Elon Musk had made since taking over Twitter, pulling the rug out from under developers might seem relatively minor. After banning third-party clients without warning, Twitter announced that it would no longer allow any developer to use its APIs for free.
So far, Twitter has communicated very little about the changes, other than confirming a February 9th cut-off date. Musk has suggested Twitter could charge $100 a month “with ID verification,” but hasn’t elaborated. What we do know, is that once free access is shut off, thousands of apps, research projects, bots and other services will stop functioning (or, at the very least, be interrupted). If you’re a Twitter user, chances are this will affect you in some way, and you shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to prepare.
Elon Musk has bodyguards at Twitter HQ who even accompany him to bathroom.
During an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama program, a Twitter staff member told the broadcaster that Musk did not appear to trust employees.
He argued that this is evident in the level of personal security Musk, who is acting Twitter CEO, brings with him to the office.
According to the employee—who still works at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco and spoke to the BBC under the condition of anonymity—Musk is always accompanied to work by multiple bodyguards.
“Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards—very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie [style] bodyguards,” he said. “Even when [he goes] to the restroom.” [….]
The same employee—one of many current and former Twitter staffers interviewed by Panorama—also alleged that Tesla engineers were being brought in to evaluate Twitter engineers’ coding. The evaluations, which would take a few days, were being used to decide who to fire, the employee claimed, despite the complex code requiring months before it could be understood.
He said this also gave him the sense that Musk did not trust his workforce at Twitter.
And now on to another powerful psychopath, Tucker Carlson of Fox “News.” On his show last night, Carlson selectively played some of the January 6 footage that Kevin McCarthy gave him, claiming to show that there was no significant violence in the Capitol insurrection.
seeing a traitor like this is pretty infuriating. but honestly half the segment is seriously hilarious. https://t.co/vlkOfwWCzx
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering.
Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a pushby McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel. When McCarthy was struggling to gather the votes to lead the House, Carlson used his program to list two “concessions” he could make to win over far-right Republicans.
“First, release the January 6 files. Not some of the January 6 files and video — all of it,” Carlson, the most-watched host on cable news, said after McCarthy faced three failed votes. “So that the rest of us can finally know what actually happened on January 6, 2021.”
In the two months since McCarthy won the gavel, he has granted both. Carlson announced in late February that McCarthy had given him exclusive access to 44,000 hours of security video from the deadly riot before he unveiled some clips of the video on his show Monday night.
Carlson focused Monday’s segment on promoting former President Donald Trump’s narrative by showing video of his supporters walking calmly around the U.S. Capitol. He asserted that other media accounts lied about the attack, proclaiming that while there were some bad apples, most of the rioters were peaceful and calling them “sightseers,” not “insurrectionists.”
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson told his audience Monday. “Instead it shows police escorting people through the building, including the now-infamous ‘QAnon Shaman.’”
He continued: “More than 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from in and around the Capitol have been withheld from the public, and once you see the video, you’ll understand why. Taken as a whole, the video does not support the claim that Jan. 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim.”
Video that Carlson didn’t air shows police and rioters engaged in hours of violent combat. Nearly 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack. About 140 officers were assaulted that day, and about 326 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees, including 106 assaults that happened with deadly or dangerous weapons. About 60 people pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement. Two pipe bombs were also planted nearby but were not detonated.Carlson also lied about what happened to Brian Sicknick.
Read more at the NBC News link.
Some Twitter commentary on Tucker’s presentation:
TUCKER CARLSON EXCLUSIVE!
Newly released footage PROVES that in 1941 the Nazis were simply tourists in Paris! pic.twitter.com/2BH52BK7Dy
The face of Fox News is doing everything in his power to sanitize the horrific violence the nation saw unfold in real-time at the U.S. Capitol in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
And on Monday night, he had a major assist from Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who granted him exclusive access to tens of thousands of hours of January 6 security camera footage.
After continuing to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election (“it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy”), Tucker Carlson used the footage on Monday night to portray those who broke into the U.S. Capitol as mostly peaceful patriots who simply felt wronged by the system. Carlson, who falsely claimed the footage provided “conclusive” evidence proving Democrats “lied” about the events of January 6, aired footage showing some people taking selfies and meandering through the U.S. Capitol.
“Taken as a whole the video record does not support the claim that January 6th was an insurrection,” Carlson claimed. “In fact, it demolishes that claim.”
The whole episode said more about McCarthy than it did Carlson. In effect, McCarthy served as Carlson’s reluctant, but obedient, accomplice, providing Carlson the ink in the Fox News conspiracy theorist’s quest to rewrite the events of the day in which the country’s citadel of democracy was assaulted. Those events were inspired by the very same election denying rhetoric the right-wing talk channel that pays Carlson’s handsome multi-million salary gave platform to in the wake of the 2020 contest.
McCarthy, of course, knew precisely what he was doing when he handed over the footage to Carlson while denying it to actual news organizations.
Read the rest at CNN.
The third psychopath needs no introduction, of course. Trump is the psychopath who gave other psychopaths permission to take their insanity public. Here’s what he is up today.
In the face of all this madness, it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m experiencing some dissociation today. Now I’m going to sit quietly for awhile and try to pull myself together.
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So far, things are going well here at the KatHouse. Keeley has not had a seizure since last Monday and is resigned to her pill regime. I hope we can continue on this path!
I’m sharing some Japanese paintings and block prints of the upcoming Cherry Blossom Season. My late mother-in-law was born and raised in Kyoto during World War 2. The season is vital to Japan and Washington D.C., where everyone recognizes the beautiful sakura blooming on the mall. I love it because it always starts on the Spring Equinox, which occurred the day Doctor Daughter was born. It starts on March 20 this year, and it’s another Monday, so I may give you some more Sakura artwork.
The National Cherry Blossom Festival, an annual spring celebration in the capital, commemorates the gift of 3,020 Japanese cherry trees given by former Toyko Mayor Yukio Ozaki to the U.S. in 1912, which were planted in Washington, D.C.
The Sakura tree does not actually produce cherries. They give us these brilliant pink blossoms when we need to remove the winter darkness from our national psyche. So, that’s one symbol of rebirth we can enjoy coming from Washington, D.C. I’m keeping that in mind as I read the news today.
Yet the filing is filled with frustrating dead ends, the result of the network’s aggressive effort to prevent disclosure of many of the internal communicationsthat came out of discovery in the case, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News. The black passages in the document raise the questions: What is Fox News hiding? And will those passages ever be unredacted?
As the Dominion filing makes clear, Fox News executives panicked in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election. The network had called Arizona on election night for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a move regarded as treason by the network’s MAGA crowd, which declared viewers would flee to the competition, especiallyconservative cable news outlet Newsmax.
So, Fox News tried playing both sides — a little conspiracy-mongering here, a little factual injection there. Anything to hang on to its ratings preeminence.
One way the network competed with Newsmax was to host election-denying attorney Sidney Powell and her extravagant claims. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who appeared multiple times in the Dominion filing, apparently commented on the situation, though the public, for now, doesn’t have the goods:
Impenetrable black expanses in the filing thwart a complete understanding of what was happening as Fox News faced down a ratings collapse. We do know what happened when White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a stolen election claim made by Trump: Host Tucker Carlson advocated for her firing. Similar tensions arose when anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from a news conference at which Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, was inveighing against the election. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cavuto said on air. “She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”
Pictures of the redacted bits and more examples are included in the media critic’s take at the link. David Folkenflik at NPR has this piece today. “Fox News stands in legal peril. It says defamation loss would harm all media”. Faux is uniquely a propaganda outlet. I’m not sure its demise will be significant for other media other than to create more room to breathe. Can you imagine not having to offset the Fox Lies daily? An entire group of comedians may become unemployed, but that’s like Faux, which is a self-serving entertainment and propaganda outlet.
Outside legal observers say the Fox News Channel finds itself in real legal jeopardy in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by an election tech company over lies broadcast about the 2020 presidential race.
The amount and weight of evidence is perhaps without equal among other major, recent defamation cases.
“How often do you get ‘smoking gun’ emails that show, first, that persons responsible for the editorial content knew that the accusation was false, and also convincing emails that show the reason Fox reported this was for its own mercenary interests?” says Rutgers University law professor Ronald Chen, an authority on constitutional and media law.
Fox News has endured one humiliation after another from the rolling revelations in the case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Private communications made public in legal filings demonstrate the network’s producers, stars and executives — even controlling owner Rupert Murdoch — knew the claims they were broadcasting were false, and at times unhinged. A trial in the case is slated for next month.
Fox’s legal team is grounding much of its defense in a claim that it was merely reporting allegations by the most newsworthy public official of all, then-President Donald Trump.
“We err on the side of speech because the more and more speech you have, the better chance of having people actually getting the opportunity to point out what’s right and what’s wrong,” attorney Erin Murphy, one of the senior figures on Fox’s defense team, tells NPR in an interview. “And that’s why we don’t suppress the speech that we don’t think is right.”
A loss for Fox would make it harder for all journalists to serve the public, she says.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to hinder the ultimate objective of the First Amendment, of getting to the truth,” Murphy argues.
The case may serve as a test for the elasticity of that argument.
Cherry Blossom Flurry, 1903, Kayburagi Kiyokata. The Smithsonian.
It also tests the elasticity of calling nearly anyone at Faux an actual reporter rather than a propaganda spewer or hate-mongering shouter of conspiracy theories. I suppose I should be more excited about the possibility of a less Trumpy network and Republican Party, but those waiting in the right wing are just as, if not more, scary. It’s also still well-funded by freak families like the Mercers. They die off and come back like Koch zombies.
As I pulled into Matt Schlapp’s preferred Gaylord Hotel in suburban Washington for the latest rendition of CPAC, ghosts of past selves flashed through my head. I remembered 2015, my last time at the gathering. It was an early inflection point in Jeb!’s campaign. As Bush was interviewed on stage by an obsequious Sean Hannity, a Revolutionary War cosplayer in a tricorne hat led a walkout. I was backstage managing an impending Breitbart News story about how Jeb’s new spokesman (moi) and campaign manager were hostile to homophobes.
It’s been quite the journey since then.
For all the familiar flashbacks, this year’s CPAC felt . . . different and a little sad. You might even say, low energy. Rick Wilson put it well on Charlie’s podcast this weekend, comparing the event to a “collapsing neutron star . . . it’s smaller. It’s hotter. It’s more intensely crazy.” A reporter at the event had a different sad-sack metaphor, describing the energy in the building as “what it feels like when the Apple Store leaves a dying mall.”
It’s funny, in a laugh-out-loud sort of way. Because we’re not laughing with CPAC. We’re laughing at it. But cheap laughs aside, there are some consequential questions about CPAC’s decline.
Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.
These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.
“I felt very bleak,” said Lisa Childers, an Arkansas teacher who was forced by an assistant principal, for reasons never stated, into yanking Wollstonecraft’s famous 1792 polemic from her high school English class in 2021.
The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation. These fights, which have already generated at least 64 state laws reshaping what children can learn and do at school, are likely to intensify ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the same time, an ascendant parents’ rights movement born of the pandemic is seeking — and winning — greater control over how schools select, evaluate and offer children access to both classroom lessons and library books.
In response, teachers are changing how they teach.
A study published by the Rand Corp. in January found that nearly one-quarter of a nationally representative sample of 8,000 English, math and science teachers reported revising their instructional materials to limit or eliminate discussions of race and gender. Educators most commonly blamed parents and families for the shift, according to the Rand study.
The piece continues with a list of how 20 educators nationwide have changed and eliminated teaching “certain” subjects. Jose Pagliery writes this in today’s The Daily Beast. “How a New DOJ Memo Sets Up Two Potential Trump Indictments. What seemed like a narrow decision could have far-reaching implications.”
When the Department of Justice took the position this week that former President Donald Trump acted improperly by urging his followers to attack Congress in 2021, prosecutors did more than open the door to a potential flood of civil lawsuits from police officers who were injured on Jan. 6.
What they actually did, according to legal scholars, is lay the groundwork for a potential criminal indictment against Trump for inciting the insurrection.
“If they took the position that the president was absolutely immune, then they wouldn’t be able to bring a criminal prosecution,” said one person familiar with the DOJ’s ongoing investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Legal scholars have come to the same conclusion.
“Had DOJ concluded that incitement unprotected by the First Amendment could nevertheless be within the president’s official functions, that could conceivably have impacted criminal charging decisions related to the same speech,” said Mary B. McCord, a former federal prosecutor now teaching at Georgetown University Law Center.
At the behest of the District of Columbia’s federal appellate court, the DOJ last week submitted a legal memo weighing in on a civil dispute by injured police officers. The department clarified that Trump’s speech, full of vitriol and fury, was not protected by presidential immunity, nor was it protected by his own free speech rights under the First Amendment.
“Such incitement of imminent private violence would not be within the outer perimeter of the Office of the President of the United States,” the DOJ wrote.
The department went out of its way to say it doesn’t necessarily support officer lawsuits against Trump, noting that it “expresses no view on that conclusion, or on the truth of the allegations in plaintiffs’ complaints.” But by making clear that Trump’s speech was outside the norms of his office, it stripped the former president of virtually any defense he could make.
“If they’re saying it’s outside the scope of immunity of civil suits, and outside the scope of protected speech, there really isn’t anything else out there protecting Trump,” said one attorney, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid rattling DOJ leadership.
The two indictments Trump could face are for his incitement of the Jan. 6 riot—a federal crime—and his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, a state case there.
So far, the Justice Department has not indicated its legal analysis of the looming federal case against Trump, which concerns the effort his campaign led to undermine the electoral vote by Congress. However, its new legal memo draws a clear red line on his actions during the lead up to the actual attack on Congress.
Now, I’m contemplating the difference between the rebirth of life in spring and unwanted zombies in your Government and Media. Well, that will be another rabbit hole for me to enter, and rabbits are an elemental totem of spring.
Have yourselves a good, peaceful week, and start looking for the signs of spring!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
And don’t laugh, but I can actually play Sakura on the koto. It’s like the first thing kids learn!
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I’m not finding a lot of exciting stories today, which is actually fine with me, because I’m going through one of my periods of being burned out on political news. So once again, I’m offering a mixed bag of odds and ends that I found interesting. Here goes…
CPAC is still in the news and, as Dakinikat indicated yesterday, it’s even more bizarre than ever before.
Its sponsors include multiple organizations founded by convicted criminals. Key speaking slots are filled with prominent election deniers. Many top Republicans are keeping their distance.
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the most troubled parts of the conservative movement were on full display.
“It has transformed itself into a Donald Trump-supporting group fully engaged with election deniers, culture wars and indicted guests,” said Al Cardenas, who led the American Conservative Union (ACU), which produces the event, from 2011 to 2014.
“It’s Schlapp, Inc. and Trump grifters,” said GOP strategist Dennis Lennox, who has attended CPAC since 2007, referring to CPAC and Matt Schlapp, the current head of the ACU, who faces his own legal problems.
Sponsors in years past have included blue chip companies like Google and pillars of the conservative movement like the Heritage Foundation, the National Review and the Washington Times.
Among this year’s CPAC sponsors: America’s Frontline Doctors, whose founder Simone Gold was sentenced to 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the #WalkAway Foundation, whose leader Brandon Straka was sentenced to three years’ probation after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct and admitting he recorded himself telling Capitol rioters to “go go go.”
Other sponsors include New Federal State of China, a lobbying group cofounded by former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was convicted in July 2022 of contempt of Congress. Real America’s Voice, a network that broadcasts Bannon’s “War Room” program on which 2020 election falsehoods continue to prevail, is also a sponsor, with a large booth for broadcasting outfitted in red, white and blue signage.
Reilly and Severns trace the history of CPAC beginning in the 1970s and describe how it has devolved over the years.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley stepped into the hallway after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday to supporters asking for selfies and autographs — and, from others, a less friendly greeting.
“We love Trump, we love Trump!” a crowd around her started chanting. Some Haley supporters shouted her name back as the former U.N. ambassador escaped with staff to an elevator.
Svetlana Novikova, Black Cat
The dust-up showed the risks of taking the primary fight to what has clearly become Trump’s home turf. Though CPAC has long been seen as a big-tent forum for the conservative movement and a mandatory cattle call for presidential hopefuls, the annual conference has increasingly grown into a stomping ground for the 45th president and his “Make America Great Again” wing of the GOP. Trump will speak at the event Saturday.
“Remember, you’re not at CPAC, you’re at TPAC,” John Fredericks, a pro-Trump talk radio host broadcasting from the sidelines here, said in an interview Wednesday. He said potential 2024 rivals opted to skip the conference rather than risk getting booed or losing the straw poll. “We own this thing, it’s ours,” he said. “No Trump, no CPAC.”
This year’s lineup was heavy with Trump family members and acolytes — such as Lara Trump, Donald Trump Jr., former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, losing 2022 Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — to the near-total exclusion of the party’s other voices.
It’s a mystery to me what these people see in Trump. He has only sunk deeper into dementia over the past two years, but he symbolizes something for these strange people–maybe it’s just that he gives them permission to hate.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Maryland. And the members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat.
Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl.
And that’s not all. Here is a fact check of 13 false claims from the conference, which continues on Saturday.
Head over to CNN to read the detailed list of lies with corrections.
Fallout continues from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News.
A complaint has been filed against Fox Corp. and chairman Rupert Murdoch over allegations that the network chief gave confidential information in 2020 to former president Donald Trump’s campaign.
In a suit filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday, progressive watchdog group Media Matters claims that Fox made an illegal contribution to Trump’s political action committee when Murdoch shared then-candidate Joe Biden’s campaign advertisements with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. The liberal nonprofit seeks the maximum fine allowable for violations of campaign contribution laws and “appropriate remedial action” against Fox, Murdoch and the Make America Great Again PAC for a “nefarious attempt by people in power to operate a press entity as a political organization.”
Randall Spangler, Fish Juggler
A filing in Dominion Voting System’s defamation suit against Fox included claims that Murdoch gave Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public. It cited a deposition from Murdoch and internal company communications.
The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibits campaign contributions from corporations, including direct or indirect gits of money or services. The FEC considers information about advertising, messaging and other campaign strategy a contribution, according to the complaint.
While there are press exemptions for violations of the FEC Act, the suit alleges that Fox wasn’t acting as a press entity. It stresses that the ads hadn’t aired at the time Murdoch provided the information to Kushner and that the ads were covertly shared to hide the alleged misconduct.\
“This ‘distribution’ is diametrically opposed to Fox Corporation’s regular press activity broadcasting news programming through television and radio outlets and online publications,” writes Angelo Carusone, a lawyer for Media Matters in the suit. “Murdoch’s secret conveyance of the Biden advertisement is even less like press activity than a cablecasting company sending campaign flyers in its bills – and neither can be protected by the press Exemption.”
The thunderclap of stories showing Fox News’ role in pushing 2020 election fraud conspiracies and aiding Donald Trump’s campaign has intensified calls among Democrats to black out the network.
The revelations, made public as part of a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, showed that some network hosts and executives endorsed lies about Trump’s loss, hosted conspiracy theorists whom they thought were unhinged, and overtly prioritized the company’s profit over truth. A related deposition of the media empire’s chair, Rupert Murdoch, revealed that he shared private intel about Joe Biden’s campaign TV ads and provided debate strategy with top Trump advisers.
For years, Democrats have been engaged in a debate over whether the party should shun the cable news giant or grudgingly use its airwaves to run counterprogramming. But in the midst of the latest saga, a newer type of reaction has emerged: that they should sever all ties, including any money spent advertising on the network.
“There is nothing in those documents to show they operate like a real news organization,” said Doug Gordon, a Democratic strategist. “If you are running a campaign in 2024, how do you in good faith hand your ads to Fox when you know they handed them over to Republicans? If there are any general election debates, how do you let Fox be a moderator?”
There is no indication, at this juncture, that major Democratic entities are ready to halt their ad buys on Fox News, let alone its many affiliates. But that is partially because few Democratic campaigns or causes are currently spending ad money. In the interim, the Dominion lawsuit revelations have led to louder calls for the party to make a firm break from any involvement with the cable channel, whom they view as functionally a campaign arm for Republicans. Democrats spanning the ideological spectrum have even started calling on the White House Correspondents’ Association — the group of news reporters advocating for press access — to boot Fox News reporters from the briefing room.
I’m skeptical that the wimpy Democrats will actually follow through on any of this, but I’d love to be surprised.
In his first minute onstage at CPAC on Friday, Steve Bannon identified one of his top targets of the moment, an entity he claimed is opposing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at its own peril: Fox News.
The host of the popular War Room podcast and longtime Trump hand started by ripping the conservative channel for announcing that Joe Biden had won Arizona on election night in 2020.
By Richard Adams
“Fox News illegitimately called it for the opposition, and not Donald J. Trump,” the Trump adviser-turned-talk show host told the crowd in National Harbor, Maryland, an audience full of diehard MAGA supporters.
Ten minutes in, Bannon went after the network again, rousing the audience to their feet as he called out Fox for not having Trump on since he announced his campaign in November. He called out Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp. founder who sits atop the media empire.
“Murdoch, you’ve deemed Trump’s not going to be president,” Bannon continued as the crowd roared with applause. “But we deem that you’re not going to have a network, because we’re going to fight you every step of the way.”
Far from random broadsides, Bannon’s screed against Fox News was the latest in what has become a hot war between MAGA world and the longtime conservative channel. Trump himself has gone off on Fox News before, often for coverage he has deemed unfair. But the current state of affairs — coming at the start of what promises to be a deeply contested GOP primary — is as strained as it has ever been.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Friday to reaffirm America’s commitment to help hold Russia responsible for war crimes, a Justice Department spokeswoman said.
Mr. Garland held several meetings with President Volodymyr Zelensky and foreign law enforcement officials in Lviv, while attending the United for Justice Conference, the department said in an email.
During the conference, Mr. Garland “reaffirmed our determination to hold Russia accountable for crimes committed in its unjust and unprovoked invasion against its sovereign neighbor,” the email said.
Mr. Zelensky, in his nightly address, said the thrust of the conference was to hold Russia’s leadership to account for atrocities committed by its army, a position he has hammered home repeatedly over the last year of war. “The main issue of all these meetings and the Lviv conference is accountability,” he said.
Mr. Garland’s visit, which was not public in advance for security concerns, comes on the heels of President Biden’s trip to Kyiv last month — and two days after Mr. Garland told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was determined to hold Russians accountable for war crimes they are committing in Ukraine.
Mr. Garland, a former federal judge whose family escaped the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, singled out Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Moscow-allied Wagner paramilitary group.
“Mr. Prigozhin, who runs this thing, is in my view a war criminal — and maybe that’s inappropriate for me to say as a judge before getting all the evidence,” Mr. Garland told the committee.
Mr. Garland added that he believes the group “is responsible for the attacks on Ukrainians in the Donbas” and accused them of using prisoners from Russia “as cannon fodder” in Ukraine.
Ever since Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, it has become rare for major international conferences to invite Russian officials. So, when an Indian think tank welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to speak, it made for some awkward exchanges.
This week, India’s Observer Research Foundation gathered academics, business executives and diplomats from the G-20, or Group of 20 economies, for a conference in Delhi known as the Raisina Dialogue.
On Friday, Lavrov took center stage of a Q&A session, where he voiced Moscow’s views on the war in Ukraine.
In one exchange, Lavrov received loud applause for accusing the West of having a double standard, noting its heavy criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite Western powers having invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In another, the reaction was less positive.
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people,” he said.
Before Lavrov could finish his sentence, the audience laughed and groaned — loud enough for the foreign minister to pause and stumble on his words.
“Of course it influenced the policy of Russia, including the energy policy. And the blunt way to describe what is the change, what changed, we would not anymore rely on any partners in the West,” Lavrov added.
Page Six hears that Kellyanne Conway, the longtime advisor to President Donald Trump, and George Conway, the longtime tormentor of President Trump, have decided to divorce after 22 years of marriage.
Beltway insiders tell us that they’ve both lawyered up and that the two sides are hashing out the details of the split.
During the 2016 elections, Kellyanne served first as a campaign advisor to candidate Trump and then as his campaign manager, while her husband co-founded the Lincoln Project with the express purpose of keeping Trump out of the White House.
After the inauguration, she became senior counselor to the president, while George continued to lambast Trump at every opportunity on social media.
In 2022, Vanity Fair wrote that, “One of the greatest mysteries of the 21st century is the marriage of Kellyanne Conway and her husband, George — specifically, if they hate each other as much as their public commentary would suggest, or if the whole thing is some kind of three-dimensional chess designed to further their own interests.” [….]
The pair wed in 2001 and share four children, but their political differences during the Trump administration took a toll on their relationship.
In her 2022 memoir “Here’s the Deal,” Kellyanne said that she considered George’s steady barrage of criticism of the then-president a betrayal of their marriage, calling it “cheating by tweeting.” She also said that Ivanka Trump had suggested couples therapy.
President Biden had one cancerous skin lesion removed from his chest on Feb. 16, his longtime doctor Kevin C. O’Connor said in a letter Friday. O’Connor said that all cancerous tissue was successfully removed, and no further treatment is needed.
A biopsy confirmed that the small lesion was basal cell carcinoma, O’Connor said. The biopsy was performed on the same day as Biden’s annual physical.
Basal cell carcinoma, O’Connor explained, does not tend to spread or metastasize, as more-serious skin cancers, like melanoma, do. This type of carcinoma is the most common form of cancer diagnosed in the United States.
Per O’Connor, the area of the biopsy has healed nicely and Biden, 80, will continue to undergo dermatologic monitoring as part of his ongoing health care.
O’Connor noted at the time of Biden’s physical that he had several non-melanoma skin cancers removed before assuming the presidency.
After Biden’s physical exam in February, O’Connor said in a memo that the president remains “a healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute duties of the presidency.”
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Saturday Show,” noted historian Michael Beschloss was asked about Donald Trump’s drive for a third GOP presidential nomination which then led to him to question the former president’s fitness to run while also comparing him to a cockroach.
Speaking with host Jonathan Capehart, Beschloss grew animated when talking about the former president’s ability to be held to account for his offenses and suggested the threat of multiple indictments could impact the former president’s health.
“Now we haven’t ever seen a president potentially indicted like this, and maybe dealing with serious multiple indictments from various places, various judicial agencies,” he exclaimed. “That’s something we haven’t seen before.”
“Even Donald Trump, who has the survival abilities of a cockroach, I’m not sure if he can withstand if he is potentially indicted, and we don’t know that this is gonna happen,” he continued.
The headline is a bit misleading, as Beschloss didn’t actually call Trump a cockroach; he just compared Trump’s ability to survive with cockroaches.
An appointee to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new oversight board in control of Disney’s special tax district called homosexuality “evil” last year and shared a baseless conspiracy theory that tap water could be making more people gay.
On Monday, the Republican governor appointed Ron Peri, an Orlando-based former pastor and the CEO of The Gathering – a Christian ministry focused on outreach to men – as one of five people who will now oversee the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the government body that has given Disney unique powers in Central Florida for more than half a century.
DeSantis signed a bill in February that allowed him to replace the district’s existing board – mostly people with ties to Disney – with a five-member body that he hand-picked. The move to remove power from Disney comes nearly a year after the company spoke out against a Florida bill – which DeSantis later signed into law – to restrict certain classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.
A CNN KFile review of Peri’s past comments found that he frequently made derogatory remarks about the LGBTQ community.
“So why are there homosexuals today? There are any number of reasons, you know, that are given. Some would say the increase in estrogen in our societies. You know, there’s estrogen in the water from birth control pills. They can’t get it out,” Peri baselessly said in a January 2022 Zoom discussion, later put on YouTube. “The level of testosterone in men broadly in America has declined by 50 points in the past 10 years. You know, and so, maybe that’s a part of it.”
“But the big part I would suggest to you, based upon what it’s saying here, is the removal of constraint,” he continued. “So our society provided the constraint. And so, which is the responsibility of a society to constrain people from doing evil? Well, you remove the constraints, and then evil occurs.”
Read more at CNN.
That’s it for me today. What stories are you following?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The report carried a plain title: Plan D. Reading it, I wondered if the D stood for “doomsday.”
The Sakura tree does not actually produce cherries. They give us these brilliant pink blossoms when we need to remove the winter darkness from our national psyche. So, that’s one symbol of rebirth we can enjoy coming from Washington, D.C. I’m keeping that in mind as I read the news today.
On Friday, Lavrov took center stage of a Q&A session, where he voiced Moscow’s views on the war in Ukraine.
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