News chunk & bits: An analysis of insurrection arguments; AI lawyering is coming; Etc.

The Nation published an excellent legal analysis that concludes the USSC will leave DJT on the ballot in all states and the vote will probably be 9-0, or maybe 8-1 with Sotomayor dissenting. One point that all the Repubs and two of the three Dems raised is the prospect of some states blithely tossing Biden off the ballot and some seriously tossing DJT off the ballot for actual insurrection, leaving the presidential election a disaster. The Nation eviscerated that argument like this: 

Still, it was only when Jason Murray, the lawyer representing the effort to keep Trump off the ballot, rose to argue that the justices really started tipping their hands. Roberts, along with justices Samuel Alito, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all asked Murray why one state—Colorado—should be allowed to decide who gets to be on the ballot for, essentially, the rest of the country.  

Murray had a credible answer for this, one that usually wins in conservative circles: states’ rights. 

[But Kagan] (like Roberts and Alito) kept hammering on hypotheticals, in which one state would exclude Trump while other states would exclude “other” candidates, and we’d be left in a situation where each state would have entirely different ballots for the presidential election.

Murray, again, had a basically credible answer to this. He said that we had to trust states to apply their own laws faithfully. He pointed out that insurrection was pretty rare and it was unlikely that states would cynically use the standard for political means. Now, I think we all know that Murray’s hopes and dreams are flatly wrong, given that we’ve all seen what red-state governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are capable of. But as a legal proposition, the court shouldn’t be deciding cases based on what it thinks bad-faith politicians will do with its decisions. At the very least, if bad-faith political maneuvers are a thing the court now cares about, it might try applying that standard to its voting rights and gerrymandering decisions first, instead of only suddenly becoming concerned about this when an insurrectionist runs for president.

That argument resonates strongly with me because of the phrase “bad-faith political maneuvers.” It is bad baith and ill-will that characterizes the thinking and behavior of America’s authoritarian radical right wealth and power movement. 

I think the author of this article, Elie Mystal, correctly analyzed the outcome of the insurrection lawsuit. DJT will stay on the ballot in 2024. Mystal ends her analysis like this, echoing Snowflake’s reasoning:

I’ve said repeatedly that there is no way in hell the Supreme Court would allow the likely Republican nominee to be stricken from the ballot. I’ve said repeatedly that courts and judges simply do not have the strength and courage to end Trump’s presidential campaign as a matter of law. I’ve said repeatedly that the only way to be rid of him is to defeat him at the ballot box, again, and beat back his forces who will try to steal the election, again.

Those warnings still hold after the court’s oral arguments. Once again, the law is not coming to save us. According to the Supreme Court, “states’ rights” exist only to make it harder for people to vote, not harder for insurrectionists to rule.

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Such Science published an article about the use of AI to do routine lawyering tasks:

New study shows that AI can lead to cost reductions 

of 99.97% for some routine legal tasks

The goal was to see whether AI can match, or even surpass, the work of junior lawyers in both quality and efficiency.

And the TL;DR answer is that yes, it can.

The study, called “Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers,” was written by a team of researchers from Onit’s AI Center of Excellence in Auckland, New Zealand (Onit is a company that provides software and advice for legal, compliance, and other corporate departments).

The paper was published on January 24 on arXiv, a directory of preprints that have not yet been peer-reviewed, maintained by Cornell University.

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Rolling Stone reports that a Christian nationalist Hobby Lobby billionaire family will be advertising for God in the Superbowl on Sunday:

This Evangelical Billionaire Family Wants to 

Convert You on Super Bowl Sunday

The Super Bowl will once again feature ads promoting Jesus, thanks in large part to the billionaire family that leads Hobby Lobby.

He Gets Us, the billion-dollar campaign to further raise Jesus’ profile, will be back at the big game this year to spread the good word. According to Greg Miller, a spokesman for the campaign, a 60-second spot will appear in the first quarter of the matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, followed by a 15-second spot in the second half of the CBS and Univision broadcasts. Both ads “will emphasize loving our neighbors like Jesus did, encouraging people to respect and serve each other,” Miller says.  

The motivation behind the He Gets Us campaign, according to Green, is a desire to reshape public perception of Christians: “What we’re known as, as Christians, we’re known as haters,” he said in a podcast interview last year. “We’re beginning to be known as haters — we hate this group, we hate that group. But we’re not. We are people that have the very, very best love story ever written, and we need to tell that love story. So, our idea is, let’s tell the story. As a Christian, you should love everybody. Jesus loved everybody.”

The atheist peanut gallery had some interesting things to say about this. Apparently some do not fully believe the bit about Christians loving all people:

1. Friendly reminder: the Hobby Lobby CEO knowingly financially supported Islamic terrorists in the Middle East by buying looted antiquities. Hobby Lobby lawyers told him that the antiquities were very likely to be looted. He didn’t care. Then he lied on import forms for some of them. [Here is an AP article about the looted antiquities]

2. Anyone without his money would be in jail for what he did.

3. It’s no surprise this right wing fake-Christian broke the commandment about lying for stolen antiquities.

4. Exactly, I hate it when people use the “no true Scotsman” bullshit because it lets Christians off the hook. Of course not all Christians are like that, but most of them have seemed to turn a blind eye to all of the horrible shit that’s done in the name of Christianity. They should be calling out other Christians when they are being terrible people.