Dominion Voting Systems lowered the boom on Fox News yesterday. Dominion has asked for a summary judgment in its suit against Fox. The brief filed yesterday in support of the motion is a doozy. You can read it here, with a few redactions. The brief makes it abundantly clear that the Fox News bobbleheads knew good and well that what Fox News was presenting about Dominion voting machines was nonsense.

This gets to the heart of what I wrote a couple of days ago about reckless disregard for the truth. See also With Actual Malice and Reckless Disregard. The New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) ruling gave news organizations considerable protection from defamation suits, particularly when a reporter gets facts about a public figure wrong. Sullivan allows for honest mistakes. But Fox News hosts and management collaborated to present lies that they knew were lies to their viewers. This is even worse than “reckless disregard.”

It may be that it was interviewees spewing the lies, not the on-air Fox personalities. But the brief presents examples of Fox managers and hosts reprimanding colleagues for fact checking.  Aaron Blake at WaPo:

The filing repeatedly shows Fox News hosts and superiors objecting to how their colleagues fact-checked the Trump team’s claims. In one example, host Neil Cavuto cut away from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who had claimed Democrats took positions on voting issues because they were “welcoming fraud” and “illegal voting.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cavuto said, adding, “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this. I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up.”

Three sections of the Fulton County Special Grand Jury’s report have been released. No names were named. This is from the Guardian:

The Fulton County special grand jury investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies illegally tried to overturn his electoral defeat in Georgia says they found that there was “no widespread fraud” in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

The report’s introduction and conclusion, along with a section in which the grand jurors expressed concerns that some witnesses may have lied under oath, were released Thursday. But any recommendations on potential criminal charges will remain under wraps for now.

I’ll keep an eye out for more detailed commentary.

CNN reports that Special Counsel Jack Smith is locked in at least eight secret court battles in the Trump investigations.

Special counsel Jack Smith is locked in at least eight secret court battles that aim to unearth some of the most closely held details about Donald Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and handling of classified material, according to sources and court records reviewed by CNN.

The outcome of these disputes could have far-reaching implications, as they revolve around a 2024 presidential candidate and could lead courts to shape the law around the presidency, separation of powers and attorney-client confidentiality in ways they’ve never done before.

Yet almost all of the proceedings are sealed, and filings and decisions aren’t public.

You probably heard the news last night that Jack Smith subpoenaed Mark Meadows. This was followed by a grumbling chorus of “Why’d it take so long for the DOJ to subpoena Mark Meadows?”

The sickest thing I’ve read this week:

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.

This is Handmaid’s Tale stuff. There is no benign reason for the state to track anybody’s menstrual cycle.

Josh Marshall had an interesting talk with Paul Krugman:

We talked to economist and Times columnist Paul Krugman today in a TPM Inside Briefing. The full interview will be available for members tomorrow. But the biggest surprise for me came when we spoke about the debt ceiling. I think most of us assume that minting trillion dollars coins or invoking the 14th amendment amount to a kind of politics nerd fanfic — cool and probably the right thing to do but not at all things that are actually going to happen. Krugman told TPM he assumes that that’s exactly what will happen. They’ll deny it till the last moment. But if it comes down to the wire and the White House has to choose between default and one of several legal stratagems to save the full-faith-and-credit hostage from the House radicals’ firing squad they’ll do just that.

To be clear, he didn’t say he was sure or that it was guaranteed. But the fact that it’s his working assumption came as a pretty big surprise to me. He also points so much less discussed strategies as ones that may be more likely than boffo ideas like the trillion dollar coin.

 

There doesn’t seem to be a paywall on this bit, so you can read the whole thing. And here’s a video.

Finally, I was reminded today that sometime in January Kevin McCarthy had the metal detectors outside the House of Representatives removed. That means it’s only a matter of time before somebody with a gun gets into the House and shoots somebody else. I just want to be on record predicting this now.

Update: I was not expecting this. Proud Boys move to subpoena Trump in seditious conspiracy trial —

Leaders in the far-right Proud Boys group, accused in federal court of plotting to use violence to keep Donald Trump in power, are asking the Justice Department to help them force the former president to testify.

Good luck with that.

I’ve written about Lamar Johnson in the past; here and here. Johnson was convicted of murder in 1995 on outrageously fabricated evidence. But even after two other men confessed to the murder Johnson couldn’t get a new hearing in Missouri. St. Louis prosecutor Kimberly Gardner had to fight with the state for the past few years before finally getting a hearing in December 2022. Today, the conviction was overturned, and Lamar Johnson was freed.

The Washington Post has a long article by Michael Kranish about the business dealings between Trump and Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (no paywall).

Three sections of the Fulton County Special Grand Jury’s final report will be released to the public on Thursday, per an order from a Fulton County district judge. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are saying they really truly have looked everywhere and have turned over all the classified documents now. This time they really did. Cross their hearts and hope to die.

One of the last bits the Trump lawyers turned over was an empty folder marked “classified evening summary.” The lawyers were a bit miffed that the authorities even wanted the folder, which was empty. Trump was using it as a lampshade.

“He has one of those landline telephones next to his bed, and it has a blue light on it, and it keeps him up at night. So he took the manilla folder and put it over so it would keep the light down so he could sleep at night,” Parlatore [one of the lawyers] said. “It’s just this folder. It says ‘Classified Evening Summary’ on it. It’s not a classification marking. It’s not anything that is controlled in any way. There is nothing illegal about it.”

I’m not sure I’d take the word of a Trump lawyer about what is illegal and what isn’t.

Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer have a long article at the New York Times headlined Jack Smith, Special Counsel for Trump Inquiries, Steps Up the Pace. (No paywall.)

Did former President Donald J. Trump consume detailed information about foreign countries while in office? How extensively did he seek information about whether voting machines had been tampered with? Did he indicate he knew he was leaving when his term ended?

Those are among the questions that Justice Department investigators have been directing at witnesses as the special counsel, Jack Smith, takes control of the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents found in his possession after he left office.

I liked this part.

In addition to the documents and Jan. 6 investigations, Mr. Smith appears to be pursuing an offshoot of the Jan. 6 case, examining Save America, a pro-Trump political action committee, through which Mr. Trump raised millions of dollars with his false claims of election fraud. That investigation includes looking into how and why the committee’s vendors were paid. …

… A vast array of Trump vendors have been subpoenaed. Investigators have been posing questions related to how money was paid to other vendors, indicating that they are interested in whether some entities were used to mask who was being paid or if the payments were for genuine services rendered.

Of course Trump misused donations to his PAC, just as he misused donations to his old charity, and we still don’t know where the inauguration money went.

The intensified pace of activity speaks to his goal of finishing up before the 2024 campaign gets going in earnest, probably by summer. At the same time, the sheer scale and complexity and the topics he is focused on — and the potential for the legal process to drag on, for example in a likely battle over whether any testimony by Mr. Pence would be subject to executive privilege — suggest that coming to firm conclusions within a matter of months could be a stretch.

I’ve gotten to the point that I just want to live long enough to see Trump in jail. Sometimes it seems we’ll both die of old age first.

Next item: The balloons. Am I the only one not concerned about the balloons? The balloons are mildly interesting. They are not hair-on-fire worrisome. This was a scary balloon:

The recent balloons just aren’t that frightening. For all we know the smaller balloons shot down over the weekend were somebody’s hobby.

I’ve been writing nerdy history articles at another site called Patheos. Some of y’all might get a kick out of this one, on the British invasion of Tibet. I bet you didn’t know the British ever invaded Tibet. It’s not something Britain celebrates, I’ve noticed, even though they sorta kinda won. I even found an illustration, from a French magazine —

There’s a report at Rolling Stone that Twitter had an entire database of Republican requests to censor posts. I don’t know if this fact came out during last week’s House Oversight Committee hearing dedicated to expressing outrage because Twitter took down Hunter Biden’s dick pics, but it’s out now.

These are important hearings because, as everybody knows, if more people had only gotten a better look at Hunter Biden’s junk, Trump would have won the election. Which he says he did win anyway, but it was stolen from him. Whatever.

The testimony at the hearings showed that requests to delete offensive tweets routinely came from people of both parties, a fact that shouldn’t surprise reasonable people.

The obvious irony here is, the sources note, that Republican leaders and elected officials have long been committing precisely the kind of “government interference” that they are now investigating, fundraising off of, and accusing Democrats and the so-called anti-Trump “Deep State” of perpetrating. Some of the loudest conservative and MAGA voices on Capitol Hill — who’ve been endlessly demanding taxpayer-funded, high-profile investigations into Big Tech “bias” and “collusion” — were themselves engaged in the behavior they now claim is colluding.

One wonders if this committee will hold any more hearings on how Big Tech and the Democratic Party are trying to “censor” them. They probably will.

And then, of course — one more time — we find that the wingnuts don’t grasp what
censorship is or what “free speech” is protected. Rep. Jamie Raskin explained to the committee that a private company, which Twitter is, can curate its own content any way it likes. The First Amendment prohibition on censorship only applies to government.

James O’Keefe is on “paid leave” from Project Veritas and may be ousted from the company he founded by its board. It turns out he’s an asshole who doesn’t work well with others. Imagine.

This one’s fun — the Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but kept findings secret. (No paywall.) 

The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.

Because the researchers found that nothing had happened that would have changed the results. But you knew that.

Note that this study was completed before January 6. It’s more evidence that Trump knew, or should reasonable have known, that his stolen election claims were false.

Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in aDecember 2020conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said.

Some people can’t handle the truth.

Do read this Greg Sargent column, This Gen Z Democrat is deftly skewering right-wing fantasies. It’s about Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the first Gen Z member of Congress. Rep. Maxwell seems very good at doing obvious things that Democrats have somehow managed not to do in the past. For example:

Frost: When President Biden took office, did your agents stop enforcing the border and just allow everyone to come in thus creating what we hear is an open border.
Chavez: The answer is no pic.twitter.com/RGP8t6KWrM

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 7, 2023

Yes, Dems, Is that so hard?

Was that some State of the Union, or what? About halfway through I was sorry I didn’t live blog it. The thing turned into an actual event.

I want to start with a couple of peripheral things. The first peripheral thing is Kyrsten Sinema’s dress.

I assume she has enough money to purchase clothes that (a) are appropriate for the occasion and (b) fit. This is neither. Although maybe she enjoys rummaging around in thrift shops for 1980s-era bridesmaid dresses, which is what this thing looks like. I wouldn’t comment except that how people dress for any sort of official or formal occasion can reflect how those people perceive themselves. This is screaming “I need an intervention!” Loudly. It also tells us that she is blissfully lacking in self-awareness. And if she had any close women friends they would have told her not to wear it.

Yes, she wanted us to notice her. She wanted us to see that she was sitting with Republicans. Fine. And next year will be your last SOTU, lady.

The other peripheral thing was The Lecture. I understand that George Who Calls Himself Santos showed up way early and grabbed an aisle seat so that he would be near the big shots when they walked in and get in a lot of photos. And then Mitt Romney put him in his place.

Mr. Romney admonished Mr. Santos for positioning himself in a prime camera-ready spot in the chamber, saying he didn’t belong there, and had no shame.

“I didn’t expect that he’d be standing there trying to shake hands with every senator and the president of the United States,” Mr. Romney said afterward to reporters who asked about the incident, which was captured on camera and erupted on social media.

He added: “Given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room.”

Mitt was right. Unfortunately Mitt somehow ended up sitting next to Big Bird Sinema during the speech.

Now for the important stuff. I have no criticisms of the speech. The President clearly was enjoying himself. He’s got to feel good about it today. Here IMO was the most memorable part:

MTG, who also had some fashion issues, made a bigger ass of herself than Kyrsten Sinema. But hell yes Republicans want to kill Social Security and Medicare. Maybe not all of them, but a substantial percertage of them do. That was something I wrote about a few days ago. You might remember the headline —

And see Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare from the New York Times, November 2022 (no paywall).

Some of them want to kill Social Security and Medicare so badly that they seem determined to utterly destroy the U.S. economy so that there won’t be any choice but to cut Social Security and Medicare.  Yes, they’ve talked recently about sunsetting; them. Yes, they’ve talked recently about raising the age for claiming benefits. No one is imagining this. There has been credible reporting on this, in some newspapers at least.

Just two days ago, Business Insider reported that Some GOP lawmakers aren’t quite ready to take Medicare and Social Security out of the debt limit battle — even after Kevin McCarthy said the matter is ‘off the table’. Just last week former Veep Mike Pence was making noises about privatizing Social Security. That’s another zombie idea that won’t die. In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik writes,

Former Vice President Mike Pence dipped his toes into the presidential campaign waters Feb. 2 with a proposal that would mean the death of Social Security.  …

…That’s when Pence unearthed the old Republican idea of privatizing Social Security wholly or partially….

… Pence didn’t say outright that he advocates killing Social Security. Instead, he took the course I reported on just last week. That’s the Republican and conservative habit of employing plausible-sounding jargon and economists’ gibberish to conceal their intention to hobble the program.

But make no mistake: Diverting any significant portion of Social Security taxes into private accounts would make the program unworkable, funnel untold wealth into the hands of Wall Street promoters and leave millions of families destitute.

Josh Marshall writes Press Is Way Behind on Social Security FlimFlam (no paywall).

The prime movers in the House spent most of last year pushing for major cuts to Social Security that would be at the top of their agenda if they reclaimed the Congress. McCarthy and others tried to rein them in a bit or rather get them to be quieter. But not much.

For most political reporters, this is like it used to be with “voter fraud.” My colleague David made the proper analogy in an editorial conversation this morning. It used to be that lots of reporters thought, “It turns out Republicans are pretty exercised about voter fraud and they seem to think there’s a lot of it. So, well, glad they’re on the case!” Over the last decade they’ve rightly taken a far more jaundiced view of this kind of malicious and deceptive GOP politicking. But when it comes to Social Security, Medicare and other social insurance programs they’re still basically there.

Maybe the press is cautious about reporting this stuff because to a sensible person making changes that would in anyway reduce Social Security payments or Medicare coverage is just unthinkable. But Republicans are not sensible people.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch Sarah Sanders’ rebuttal speech, which I understand was weird. I just want to respond to this quote from her talk:

Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.”Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols…all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your Freedom of speech.”

First, I well remember the culture war was declared by Pat Buchanan in 1992. And it’s been Republicans who have perpetrated the thing all these years. Of course, that doesn’t mean we hadn’t been at war before 1992. But the terms of the war shift. It went from desegregation to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Affirmative Action through our failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and eventually to same sex marriage rights. And the Right has, basically, been fighting in a long retreat except for abortion rights, where they’ve taken back some territory.

I don’t doubt it’s hard for them to not be able to enforce their bigotries and biases, as they could in the old days. But expecting the rest of humanity to cater to their bigotries and biases is unreasonable. As somebody said, if you don’t like gay marriage, then don’t get gay married. And considering yesterday’s post about banning books in Florida public schools, accusing the left of stripping away freedom of speech is just demented.

Anyway, back to Kyrsten Sinema’s yellow dress. I’m reading she wore matching yellow booties with it. Mercifully, the booties are not in any photos I’ve seen. It’s been reported she resells some of her used clothes and shoes on Facebook Marketplace, so expect the Big Bird dress to show up there soon.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two blurbs from the New Yorker website. There’s Ron DeSantis, merrily banning books and destroying academic freedom to save Floridians from being “woke.” And there’s Salman Rushdie, persecuted for years because of something he wrote.

Pen America, a nonprofit founded in 1922 to promote free expression in literature, has a list of books that have been removed from Duval County, Florida, schools. Some of these are baffling. Like Cow on the Town: Practicing the Ow Sound. The publisher says it tells a funny story about a cow in a big city that children can read while “reinforcing basic phonemic sounds.” Oh, yeah, that sounds subversive.

A lot of them seem to be about not-white people. These include Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story; The Gift of Ramadan (well, we know why that one’s out); Grandfather Tang’s Story; Black Frontiers: A History of African American Heroes in the Old West; Climbing Lincoln’s Steps: The African American Journey. Etc. etc. I know the author of The Rough-Face Girl, Rafe Martin. He’s a Zen teacher who tells stories. I understand this is an Algonquin story that’s sorta kinda like Cinderella.

They banned The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question? I understand that in this book Mama and Papa explain the concept of God to Stan and Jan. Maybe it wasn’t Jesus-y enough for some people.

From Jacksonville Today:

Dozens of books the Duval County school district ordered in the summer of 2021 will never hit classroom shelves. That’s the result of an ongoing review after the district pulled almost 200 books this spring while the Florida Legislature passed limits on what teachers can say about race, gender and sexual orientation in classrooms and set new rules for purchasing classroom materials. 

After a 10-month process – delayed by staffing shortages, according to the district – 47 titles are being returned to the distributor. Twenty-six others will remain in storage, awaiting further state guidance. 

Among the rejected titles are a book about Martin Luther King Jr. intended for fourth graders; a biography of Rosa Parks for second grade classrooms; a first grade Berenstain Bears book about God; and multiple titles including LGBTQ+ characters and families. District staffers are sending the rejected books back to the distributor, Perfection Learning, for exchange. 

I still want to know why they nixed Cow on the Town.

The New Yorker story about the book bans begins this way:

In late January, at Greenland Pines Elementary, kids attended a party for an annual event called Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! There was an escape room and food trucks. Brian Covey, an entrepreneur in his late thirties, came to pick up his daughter, who’s in second grade, and his son, who’s in fifth. His kids looked confused. “Did you hear what happened at school today?” his daughter asked. “They took all the books out of the classrooms.” Covey asked which books. “All the books,” she said. Covey’s son had been reading “Measuring Up,” a coming-of-age story about an immigrant to the United States from Taiwan. Students who read from a list of pre-selected books, including this one, were rewarded with an ice-cream party. “They even took that book,” Covey said.

Covey went into the school classrooms to see what his children were talking about and found bookshelves papered over to hide the books. (He also went to another local school and later uploaded a video to Twitter showing that its shelves were bare.) “This has never been an issue before,” Covey told me, noting that he’d grown up in the same public-school system, in Duval County, which includes Jacksonville. “But I read books about the consequences of this kind of thing when I was in school.” He was thinking of “Fahrenheit 451” and “1984,” he said. His kids, he added, seemed confused about what would make a book inappropriate for school. “The only way I could get them to understand was to ask what happens if a book in the library or classroom had the F-word in it a bunch of times,” he told me. “My son said, ‘We’d bring it to the teacher or the librarian.’ ” Covey couldn’t think of any books at their library that he would keep from them. (Communications officials for the public schools in Duval County insisted that some approved books remained available to students, including those on the list that Covey’s son was reading from.)

The article also links to a group in Manatee County, Florida, that’s pushing for more book bans. You really have to see this. Someone should give them a copy of Mrs. Guernsey Explains Apostrophes.

Now that the famous Chinese spy balloon is no more, whatever will we talk about?

“A senior defense official has said there have been four previous known Chinese balloon incursions over the continental United States: one early in the Biden administration and three during the Trump administration,” it says here.

I do want to talk more about the debt ceiling. WaPo has an article that lists seven proposals for budget cuts that the Republicans are considering. It’s a bit wordy, but to sum:

One. Big cuts to discretionary spending, “which includes funding for the Defense Department and other federal agencies.”

These cuts would hit politically popular programs such as spending on energy assistance for low-income Americans; K-12 education; Pell Grants for college students; the National Institutes of Health; NASA; and others. There are other, potentially less dramatic options, such as freezing future increases in non-Pentagon spending or just cutting spending by less, Riedl said. Another idea being batted around is to demand $3 of spending cuts for every $1 increase in the debt ceiling, although that still leaves the all-important question of what to cut.

Two. Cuts to Social Security and Medicare. In recent days a lot of Congress Critters have backed away from this, but they haven’t given up on it entirely.

Three. Undo the IRS Increase. A lot of them want to reverse last year’s $80 billion funding increase for the Internal Revenue Service. This would actually increase the debt considerably, but they’re too stupid to understand that. Or they understand it and want to do it anyway.

Four. Claw Back Covid Aid. There isn’t enough of it yet unspent to make that much difference.

Five. Various Anti-Immigrant Proposals. Some of them want to hold the debt ceiling hostage until there is a commitment to finish Trump’s moronic border wall. Some of them want to block all undocumented immigrants at the borders, including asylum seekers.

Six. Work Requirements to Receive Aid. Or, let’s force the destitute into indentured servitude or, even better, sharecropping. Some guy from the Manhattan Institute points out that as much fun as this proposal is, a lot of states have already done it.  “There aren’t that many places to go with work requirements that we have not gone already,” he said.

Seven. Let It Burn. Some of them want to push past the debt ceiling last days, figuring the economic chaos would give them even more leverage to cut spending they don’t like. Some of them are still talking about a “prioritization plan” would specify what payments Treasury should prioritize over other payments. That would still screw with the nation’s credit score and drive up the cost of borrowing.

In brief, they don’t have a real plan at all. They just have fantasies.