Lazy Caturday Reads

Sea cat art by Heider Taillefer

Happy Caturday!!

I’m in a surreal frame of mind this morning. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. I have a sore throat and I feel kind of lightheaded. I hope I’m not getting sick. Maybe it’s just because I’m reading a surreal book, The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. I know I should have read it years ago, but somehow I never got around to it. It’s very different from what I expected. I knew it was about a murder involving upper middle class classics students at a college in Vermont. I didn’t expect it to be full of slapstick humor. It’s somewhat disconcerting, but very well written. It has definitely taken my mind off the horror of U.S. politics.

Speaking of surreal murders, 73-year-old Lesley Van Houten is going to be let out of prison. NBC News: Manson family killer Leslie Van Houten will be paroled, lawyer says, after Gov. Newsom drops fight.

Leslie Van Houten, a follower of Charles Manson who was convicted in two killings, will be paroled in weeks, her attorney said Friday after California’s governor said he would not challenge it at the State Supreme Court.

“She’s thrilled,” Van Houten’s attorney Nancy Tetreault said.\Van Houten, now 73, will be paroled in the next several weeks after spending more than five decades in prison, Tetreault said.

An appeals court ruled in May that Van Houten is eligible for parole, reversing a decision by Gov. Gavin Newsom to reject parole.

Newsom, who has repeatedly blocked efforts for Van Houten to be paroled, had until Monday to file a challenge with the state Supreme Court.

Newsom, a Democrat, said Friday he would not do so….

Van Houten is serving a life sentence after being convicted along with other cult members of the 1969 killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Angeles.

A jury convicted Van Houten in 1971 of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. She was initially sentenced to death, but that was overturned and she has spent 52 years in state prison.

Van Houten has been before the state Board of Parole Hearings more than 20 times. The board has recommended Van Houten be paroled five times since 2016, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

She threw her life away back in 1969 when she chose to follow instructions from Manson and his  bloodthirsty cult member Susan Atkins. I doubt if she’s a danger to society at this point. 

Paris Through My Window, by Marc Chagall, 1913

There’s a bit of Trump investigation news this morning from New York Times both-sides reporter Michael Schmidt: Trump Asked About I.R.S. Inquiry of F.B.I. Officials, Ex-Aide Says Under Oath.

John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Mr. Kelly said that his recollection of Mr. Trump’s comments to him was based on notes that he had taken at the time in 2018. Mr. Kelly provided copies of his notes to lawyers for one of the F.B.I. officials, who made the sworn statement public in a court filing.

“President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into Mr. Strzok and/or Ms. Page,” Mr. Kelly said in the statement. “I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page investigated.”

Mr. Kelly’s assertions were disclosed on Thursday in a statement that was filed in connection with lawsuits brought by Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, a former lawyer in the bureau, against the Justice Department for violating their privacy rights when the Trump administration made public text messages between them.

I hope Page and Strzok finally get their revenge on Trump.

The disclosures from Mr. Kelly, made under penalty of perjury, demonstrate the extent of Mr. Trump’s interest in harnessing the law enforcement and investigative powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies. In the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Congress made it illegal for a president to “directly or indirectly” order an I.R.S. investigation or audit.

The New York Times reported last July that two of Mr. Trump’s greatest perceived enemies — James B. Comey, whom he fired as F.B.I. director, and Mr. Comey’s deputy, Andrew G. McCabe — were the subject of the same type of highly unusual and invasive I.R.S. audit.

It is not known whether the I.R.S. investigated Mr. Strzok or Ms. Page. But Mr. Strzok became a subject in the investigation conducted by the special counsel John Durham into how the F.B.I. investigated Mr. Trump’s campaign. Neither Mr. Strzok nor Ms. Page was charged in connection with that investigation, which former law enforcement officials and Democrats have criticized as an effort to carry out Mr. Trump’s vendetta against the bureau. Mr. Strzok is also suing the department for wrongful termination.

Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page exchanged text messages that were critical of Mr. Trump and were later made public by Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general under Mr. Trump, as he faced heavy criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill who were trying to find ways to undermine him.

Katzenworld, Femke Hiemstra

NBC has an interesting excerpt from the new book by former Trump official Miles Taylor: White House officials worried Trump showed reporters classified material while in office, new book recounts.

A forthcoming book by an ex-Trump administration aide describes an episode in which officials worried that then-President Donald Trump was cavalier in his handling of classified information while talking to reporters, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.

Miles Taylor, who was a top aide to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, writes about the 2018 episode in a book set to be published this month. As a sitting president at the time, Trump had broad powers to declassify information. Yet the incident Taylor describes suggests that his aides still believed he needed to show more care toward state secrets — an issue that landed him in legal peril after he left office and took sensitive records with him….

Trump was still president when the episode Taylor described unfolded Oct. 18, 2018. Taylor writes that he was in a private meeting in the West Wing with John Bolton, who was then Trump’s national security adviser.

Then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders came into Bolton’s office and described an interview that Trump had given in the Oval Office, according to Taylor’s book, “Blowback.” (It’s common for White House press aides to sit in when the president gives interviews.)

Trump had been talking to the reporters about Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and journalist who was killed that month by Saudi assassins in Turkey.

Sanders told Bolton that the president had picked up classified documents relating to intelligence on Khashoggi’s death and displayed them, Taylor writes, but that the reporters were unlikely to have been able to read the text.

Bolton gasped at first, but “breathed a sigh of relief” when Sanders told him there had been no cameras in the room, according to the book.

Still, “We were all disturbed by the lapse in protocol and poor protection of classified information,” Taylor writes.

It looks like Rudy Giuliani will finally be disbarred in DC. CBS News: Rudy Giuliani should be disbarred for false election fraud claims, D.C. review panel says.

A Washington, D.C., Bar Association review panel is recommending former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani be disbarred in Washington for his handling of litigation challenging the 2020 election on behalf of then-President Trump.

By Daniel Ryan

Giuliani “claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence,” wrote the three-lawyer panel in a report released Friday, regarding the errors and unsupported claims in a Pennsylvania lawsuit he argued seeking to overturn the Republican president’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Between Election Day and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Giuliani and other Trump lawyers repeatedly pressed claims of election fraud that were almost uniformly rejected by federal and state courts. He’s the third lawyer who could lose his ability to practice law over what he did for Trump: John Eastman faces disbarment in California, and Lin Wood this week surrendered his license in Georgia.

“Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy,” wrote the three lawyers on the panel, Robert C. Bernius, Carolyn Haynesworth-Murrell and Jay A. Brozost.

The panel’s report will now go to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final decision.

How much lower can this man sink. It’s difficult to believe that he was once a DOJ official and then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, not to mention mayor of NYC.

The Zuckerberg-Musk fight over the new Threads social media app is pretty entertaining. Here’s the latest:

The Guardian: Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter killer’ Threads hits 70m sign-ups in two days.

Mark Zuckerberg’s “Twitter-killer” Threads has reached 70m sign-ups in less than 48 hours, as it more than doubled its growth from its first day on app stores.

The new microblogging platform was launched in 100 countries this week . It immediately accumulated significant numbers of users, hitting more than 30 million within its first 24 hours, apparently making it the fastest downloaded app ever. On Friday, however, Zuckerberg announced on his Threads account that the user total had more than doubled that figure.

Marc Chagall, Le Poète

“70 million sign ups on Threads as of this morning. Way beyond our expectations,” he wrote. Threads launched around the world at 7pm EST in the US on Wednesday.

Elon Musk’s Twitter has reacted to the new rival with a formal threat to sue the “copycat” app over alleged violation of its “intellectual property rights”….

Zuckerberg, chief executive of Threads and Instagram owner Meta, has said he wants to make “kindness” a focus of the app’s appeal, in a reference to concerns that the rival platform, which has more than 250 million users, has become too hostile for some.

“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” he wrote on his Threads account. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”

That seems unlikely, knowing human nature, but we can hope.

Mashable: Threads backtracks flagging right-wing users for spreading disinformation.

If you regularly spread “false information” online, Threads already knows. The platform apparently flagged those accounts on launch, warning users that considered following them, before backtracking.

When Threads launched on Wednesday, numerous right-wing users shared(opens in a new tab) their dissatisfaction(opens in a new tab) with Twitter’s biggest competitor — on Twitter of course — over having their accounts flagged for disinformation. 

As of Friday, however, it seems the warning label on accounts that reported the issue has since disappeared….

“This account has repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against our Community Guidelines,” read the label that would pop up when another user attempted follow these accounts.

The wording on the label is similar to a warning prompt that appears on Meta services like Facebook and Instagram. As Threads is so new and still so tightly connected to Instagram, it appears Meta used an account’s existing reputation to inform Threads users of their history.

Later on, Andy Stone of Meta, said the warning labels had been posted by mistake and they were removed from right wing accounts.

Tayor Lorenz at The Washington Post: How Twitter lost its place as the global town square.

Alex Pearlman, a stand-up comedian in Philadelphia, woke up one morning in June and turned on the local news. A portion of Interstate 95 had collapsed. Pearlman thought it was the type of thing people should know about.

Five years ago, he would have turned to Twitter to spread the news. But on that Sunday morning, he picked up his phone and made a TikTok — which quickly amassed more than 2 million views.

By Michael Bridges

A decade ago, Twitter rose to prominence by casting itself as a “global town square,” a space where anyone could reach millions of people overnight. The platform was pivotal in facilitating large social movements, such as the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and the Black Lives Matter protests over police violence. In a recent email to staff, Twitter’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, repeated this characterization, calling the site “a global town square for communication.”

But Twitter no longer serves this function. Thanks to a string of disastrous missteps over the past year by new owner Elon Musk — punctuated by the decision last week to cap the number of posts users can view — Twitter is hemorrhaging users and relevance. While Meta’s new Threads app is making an impressive debut, most social media experts say TikTok reigns as the new global town square and has held that role for quite a while.

“Twitter is definitely not anyone’s public square. Not anymore,” said Chris Messina, who on Thursday posted the hashtag #DeadTwitter on Threads. Twitter is “Elon Musk’s private playground where he’s about to charge everyone … for entry and access #DeadTwitter.”

On Musk’s failed “leadership”:

Since taking the helm last fall promising to champion “free speech,” Musk has alienated users with a relentless stream of updates that are hostile to the app’s heaviest users. He removed all legacy check marks — Twitter’s years-old way to assure users that posters are really who they say they are — sowing distrust and leading to significant financial consequences for major brands that were easily impersonated under the new system. He then sold blue check marks, which ensured amplification to anyone willing to pay $8 a month, allowing scammers and grifters to crowd out the replies to popular tweets. Interesting content has been down-ranked in favor of pay-to-play blue check mark replies, some of which push crypto scams and pornography.

Musk also flooded the “for you” timeline with his own tweets, driving away users who came to the service to follow friends and interests outside of the platform’s billionaire owner.

“Before, if I saw someone was verified, they’d have to have done something of note to get it,” said Ryan Fay, a theater director in Atlanta. “Now, I can’t trust anyone who claims to be a journalist and has a check mark because they paid for it, and I don’t know if they have any credentials or knowledge. Seeing a blue check now means this person is using Twitter to try to sell me something or some sort of scamming.”

Musk also fired Twitter’s trust and safety team, allowing harassment and abuse to explode across the platform unchecked. He’s banned prominent journalists and liberal activists. He’s railed against LGTBQ people and declared the word “cisgender” a slur. If that wasn’t enough to drive the most dedicated Twitter users to greener pastures, last week he began limiting the number of tweets users could read, blocking nonpaying users from being served more than 600 tweets per day.

There’s much more on Musk’s failures at the WaPo link. For now, it feels so satisfying to have an alternative to the mess Musk made at Twitter. We’ll have to wait and see how Zuckerberg does with Threads.

Have a great Caturday everyone!!