Brazen shameless lies: Dominion settles defamation lawsuit against Faux News

From the Beyond Outrageous Lies Files: The AP reports: 

Fox and Dominion Voting Systems reached a settlement Tuesday in the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit, averting a trial in a case that exposed how the top-rated network chased viewers by promoting lies about the 2020 presidential election.

The terms of the settlement were not immediately clear.

The settlement was announced by the judge in the case, who allowed the case to go to trial while emphasizing that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations about Dominion aired on Fox by allies of former President Donald Trump were true.

A statement from Fox said the settlement reflected the network’s “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

As I expected in the case of a settlement (post yesterday), the terms of the agreement are secret. Faux gets to proudly and brazenly lie about how great it and its “highest journalistic standards” are. Faux could not care less about allowing “the country to move forward from these issues.” The only acrimony that was relevant was that between Dominion and the fascist Faux trying to protect its revenues, profits and fascist, democracy-crushing agenda. 

Update: Oops, I stand corrected. The Hill is reporting that Faux paid Dominion $787.5 million. I thought that would be kept secret.

Thoughts about normalizing people shooting people

Standing his ground

he feels threatened

I was going to ignore this, but it popped up again today. Now I'm wondering if shooting people for no reason is going to be, or already is, a new norm. In some states, the shooters are protected by stand your ground laws. In other states, shooters are protected by radical fascist Republican politicians hell bent on God only knows what, probably corrupt plutocracy-Christian theocracy. In blue states, maybe the shooters will face jail at least sometimes. Maybe.

The NYT reports on the most recent shooting:

A man in upstate New York was charged with murder on Monday in the killing of a woman who was in a car that mistakenly drove into his driveway, officials said.

The woman and the three friends she was with never got out of the car on Saturday night, Jeffrey J. Murphy, the Washington County sheriff, said at a news conference. They were turning around after realizing their error when the man, Kevin Monahan, 65, stepped out of his house, in Hebron, N.Y., and fired at least two shots at the car, the sheriff said. 

“There was no reason for Mr. Monahan to feel threatened,” Sheriff Murphy said, “especially as it appears the vehicle was leaving.”

What I wanted to ignore was another recent shooting and an older shooting where the shooter will get pardoned. The recent shooting was in Kansas City.

A White 84-year-old homeowner who allegedly shot and wounded Ralph Yarl, a Black teen, after the 16-year-old went to the wrong home to pick up his siblings will face two felony charges, Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson announced early Monday evening.

The impending shooter exoneration is in Texas:

The fate of an Army sergeant Daniel Perry, who was found guilty of fatally shooting a protester at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020, is up in the air as the Texas pardon board reviews the conviction for a possible pardon at the governor’s request and Perry’s attorney pushes for a retrial.

On April 7th, Perry, a 35-year-old active duty sergeant at Fort Hood, was convicted of murder in connection with the death of Garrett Foster, 27, who was killed after Perry shot him during a protest in Austin, Texas, in July 2020. Perry claims he acted in self-defense because he feared for his life after Foster, who was carrying an assault rifle under Florida’s open carry law, allegedly made him feel threatened.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott believes that Perry should be exonerated based on Texas’ stand your ground law, which allows using deadly force to defend yourself if you feel you’re in danger.  

Abbott called for an expedited review of Perry’s conviction on Saturday. “I am working as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry,” Abbott tweeted. “I look forward to approving the Board’s pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk.”

Q: Is it just me, or is people shooting people being normalized, even in blue states?

Useful instructional video: What gunfights are like

Bits of stuff: Transformable nanoelectronics; Debt ceiling update; Regarding power and wealth

Just when a person thinks the Transformers was fiction, science nerds come along and start to 'chip' away at the fiction. Science Advances reports that some physical components in nanoelectronic chips can be intentionally physically changed. UCI News reports:   

UC Irvine physicists discover first transformable nano-scale electronic devices

The nano-scale electronic parts in devices like smartphones are solid, static objects that once designed and built cannot transform into anything else. But University of California, Irvine physicists have reported the discovery of nano-scale devices that can transform into many different shapes and sizes even though they exist in solid states.

It’s a finding that could fundamentally change the nature of electronic devices, as well as the way scientists research atomic-scale quantum materials.

The electronic devices are modifiable much like refrigerator door magnets – stuck on but can be reconfigured into any pattern you like.

If it sounds like science fiction, said Sanchez-Yamagishi, that’s because until now scientists did not think such a thing was possible.

Indeed, Sanchez-Yamagishi and his team, which also includes UCI Ph.D. student Andrew Barabas, weren’t even looking for what they ultimately discovered.

What they saw specifically was that tiny nano-scale gold wires could slide with very low friction on top of special crystals called “van der Waals materials.”

Taking advantage of these slippery interfaces, they made electronic devices made of single-atom thick sheets of a substance called graphene attached to gold wires that can be transformed into a variety of different configurations on the fly.

Because it conducts electricity so well, gold is a common part of electronic components.

It's not clear what the ramifications of this will turn out to be. That ought to become clear in a few years as people think about this and how it can be used in electronic devices. This works because the surface of van der Waals materials are low friction, sort of like teflon coating objects to make them slippery.

Moving tiny stuff around on a chip

Scale bars, 3 μm. (A and B) Optical images of ~170-nm-tall gold squares on hBN 

before and after manipulation with an AFM tip. (C) AFM height image of a 

3-μm-wide gold square on atomically flat hBN surface with contaminants 

swept aside by sliding.

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The debt ceiling will be probably be reached sometime in June or early July. House Republicans continue to demand spending cuts and deregulation of businesses or they will let the US default on its debt. Biden continues to say the debt is not negotiable and he won't negotiate. Up to this point, radial right Republicans have refused to say what they will cut or deregulate, because we all know most people probably won't like most of it. But sooner or later, the radicals will have to show their hand. The time bomb continues to tick. The NYT reports: 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday proposed a one-year debt ceiling increase paired with a set of spending cuts and policy changes, backing down substantially from earlier demands but making clear that Republicans would not raise the borrowing limit to avert a catastrophic debt default without conditions.

In a speech delivered from the New York Stock Exchange, Mr. McCarthy said House Republicans would vote “in the coming weeks” on a measure that would lift the debt ceiling into the next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels while enacting stricter work requirements for social programs and a host of regulatory rollbacks.

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An interesting NYT opinion by Paul Krugman comments on concentrated wealth and power, plutocracy and current political events:

Plutocratic Power and Its Perils

The rich are different from you and me: They have immensely more power. But when they try to exercise that power they can trap themselves — supporting politicians who will, if they can, create a society the rich themselves wouldn’t want to live in.

This, I’d argue, is the common theme running through four major stories that have been playing out over the past few months. They are: the relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and the billionaire Harlan Crow; the rise and seeming decline of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign; the trials (literally) of Fox News; and the Muskopalypse at Twitter.

People on the right often insist that expressing any concern about highly concentrated wealth is “un-American.” The truth, however, is that worrying about the dangers great wealth poses for democracy is very much part of the American tradition. And our nation basically invented progressive taxation, which was traditionally seen not just as a source of revenue but also as a way to limit excessive wealth.

Theodore Roosevelt warned against “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Woodrow Wilson declared, “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”

How does great wealth translate into great power? Campaign finance is dominated by a tiny number of extremely rich donors. But there are several other channels of influence.

Until recently I would have said that outright corruption — direct purchase of favors from policymakers — was rare. ProPublica’s revelation that Justice Thomas enjoyed many lavish, undisclosed vacations at Crow’s expense suggests that I may have been insufficiently cynical [insufficiently realistic?].

Beyond that, there’s the revolving door: Former politicians and officials who supported the interests of the wealthy find comfortable sinecures at billionaire-supported lobbying firms, think tanks and media organizations. These organizations also help shape what military analysts call the “information space,” defining public discourse in ways that favor the interests of the superrich [the role of dark free speech].

Despite all that, however, there’s only so much you can achieve in America, imperfect and gerrymandered as our democracy may be, unless you can win over large numbers of voters who don’t support a pro-billionaire economic agenda.

It’s a simplification, but I think fundamentally true, to say that the U.S. right has won many elections, despite an inherently unpopular economic agenda, by appealing to intolerance — racism, homophobia and these days anti-“wokeness.” Yet there’s a risk in that strategy: Plutocrats who imagine that the forces of intolerance are working for them can wake up and discover that it’s the other way around.

But some of those donors are now bailing, because it looks increasingly as if DeSantis’s intolerance and conspiracy theorizing weren’t a political show — they’re who he really is. And the big money was looking for a charlatan, not a genuine fanatic.

Among the forces pushing a DeSantis candidacy has been Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Fox was essentially founded to carry out the right-wing strategy of pushing plutocratic policy while winning over working-class whites with intolerance and conspiracy theories.

And does anyone doubt that if the Republican primary goes the way it seems to be heading, Fox will soon be back in Trump’s corner?

Rupert Murdoch’s organization, then, has effectively been taken hostage by the very forces he helped conjure up.

But Elon Musk’s story is, if anything, even sadder. As Kara Swisher recently noted for Time magazine, he’s become “the world’s richest online troll.” The crazy he helped foment hasn’t taken over his organization — it has taken over his mind.

I still believe that the concentration of wealth at the top is undermining democracy. But it isn’t a simple story of plutocratic rule. It is, instead, a story in which the attempts of the superrich to get what they want have unleashed forces that may destroy America as we know it. And it’s terrifying.

Q: Is Krugman's assessment unreasonably cynical, mostly wrong or mostly right?

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A WaPo opinion by Perry Bacon comments on Biden's ineffective responses to increasing radical right aggression:

An increasingly radical Republican Party is using its power, particularly at the state level and on the judiciary, to attack women seeking reproductive care, transgender Americans, Black politicians and activists, unions, colleges and professors, Democratic-led cities, public libraries, and a vast array of other people, groups and institutions with liberal values.

And President Biden is doing little about this right-wing assault.

The result is a one-sided conflict. Republican officials are acting like they’re in a war, while Biden and many powerful Democratic officials not only don’t defend their own side but also largely refuse to acknowledge the fight.

Watch closely, and you can see a pattern: When Republican officials do something outrageous, the Biden White House follows a three-step playbook. First comes a written statement from Biden condemning the Republican action. That’s often followed by public criticism from Vice President Harris or White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Biden will occasionally have a phone call or virtual meeting on the issue, such as his recent conversation with the Tennessee lawmakers expelled by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Then it’s on to the next speech or event. The president seems to be trying to do just enough to avoid being criticized for doing nothing. Biden is, at times, literally phoning in his response to growing Republican extremism.  

So why is he doing so little?

First of all, the president seems to be conflict-averse. When he ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, Biden didn’t investigate allegations of sexual harassment against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas as hard as he could have.  

Second, while Biden has moved left in recent years, I am not sure he is fully comfortable with strongly defending, say, abortion rights or the right to gender-affirming care. These are not positions Biden has held for much of his life.  

Third, Biden is deeply entrenched in the center-left establishment wing of the Democratic Party, which has spent much of the past seven years trying to duck a full-on confrontation with Trumpism.  

So instead of Biden giving speeches at factories that no one remembers 12 hours later, he could show up in states like Kentucky and Tennessee to stand with Democrats struggling against ultra-right-wing legislators. He could also defend Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other prosecutors against Republican attempts to undermine their investigations, forcefully criticize GOP-appointed judges who are writing Trumpism into law, and speak out for honest teaching about race and sexual identity.

In my opinion, that criticism of Biden and the Democratic Party is spot on. Both are undeniably failing to reasonably at least try to vigorously defend democracy. Backing down from confrontation has failed.

Since Biden is a staunch Catholic, he probably is quite uncomfortable with abortion and gender fluidity. He really does seem to be conflict- and Trumpism-averse, e.g., no DoJ prosecution of Trump's crimes. Those Democratic Party and leadership failures could wind up being catastrophic for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. But, those failures could be wonderful for corrupt plutocrats and radical Christian theocrats. Maybe Biden and the Dem Party are grudgingly OK with that compared to where secularism and democracy has taken America.

News bits: Americans' concerns; The political donor class; Secrecy shields megasleaze

Poll data obtained in January lists public policy priorities. 

Defending democracy or protecting elections not a listed priority. However, the 4th priority is reducing the influence of money in politics. 

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A WaPo opinion describes how political donor class money circumvents laws to influence politics:

But [public concern about the influence of money in politics] not stopping America’s megadonors. In fact, wealthy contributors have been increasingly pumping cash into the political system — circumventing campaign finance laws in doing so.

Overall, political spending has ballooned in recent years:

One big reason for this has been an innovation known as “joint fundraising committees.” Both parties use them. And their influence is growing.

Here’s how they work: Election laws try to limit the influence of any one rich person by capping how much the individual can donate to a given candidate. In 2020, individuals could give no more than $5,600 directly to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. That’s a tidy sum, but it’s not enough to curry favor with Biden, who amassed more than a billion dollars in the 2020 election, or Trump, whose haul surpassed $800 million.

Joint fundraising committees render such limits meaningless. They allow presidential candidates to bring their campaign, their national party and state parties into a single fundraising entity. Donors can give a limited amount to each group, but -- thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC — they can hit the contribution limit for as many groups as they want.

The result: The maximum donation to these mega-committees is not $5,600. It’s the combined maximum for each participating group.

This is how two donors were able to cut $817,800 checks to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee run by the former president in 2020. Multiple donors gave $730,600 to the Biden Victory Fund. Both campaigns amassed hundreds of millions of dollars this way.

.... in practice, much of the money flows to the national party. .... state-level Republican parties sent 90 percent of their cut of the Trump Victory Fund to the Republican National Committee. In 2020, they sent 96 percent to the RNC. Meanwhile, Democratic state parties sent three-quarters of their haul from the Hillary Victory Fund to the DNC in 2016. In 2020, state parties gave about a quarter of their take to the DNC.

Given the amount of money involved, it seems unlikely that either party has a serious interest in reducing the influence of money in politics. Public opinion can go pound sand.

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The rule of law crashes and burns again?: Reports are coming out that the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Faux News could wind up in a settlement. If that happens, the most likely outcome (~97% chance?) is a Faux payment of an undisclosed amount to Dominion, a secrecy agreement and Faux either (i) proudly claiming that it admits no wrongdoing, or (ii) invoking KYMS to avoid FIMS. The Guardian reports:

The trial in the closely watched $1.6bn defamation lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox will begin a day later than scheduled, the judge overseeing the case announced on Sunday evening, hours before opening arguments were set to begin on Monday and amid reports of settlement talks.

The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Sunday that Fox had made a late push to settle the case out of court. Reuters also reported that the delay was due to settlement talks, according to a source familiar with the situation, as did the Washington Post, citing two sources.

KYMS = keep your mouth shut 

FIMS = foot in mouth syndrome

About a week ago, Faux settled another defamation lawsuit brought by a rich person that Faux slandered. On April 10, CNN reported:

Fox News has settled a defamation lawsuit from a Venezuelan businessman who had accused the network of making false claims about him and the 2020 election, attorneys for the man and Fox News said Saturday in a court filing.

The details of the settlement were not made public.

“This matter has been resolved amicably by both sides,” a Fox News spokesperson said Sunday, declining further comment.

Following the 2020 election, former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs had accused the businessman, Majed Khalil, of playing a key role in supposedly rigging the election against Donald Trump.

In a tweet calling the 2020 election a “cyber Pearl Harbor,” Dobbs named Khalil as one of four people he wanted his audience to “get familiar with” for committing supposed election fraud.

That's probably how the Dominion lawsuit will fizzle out if there is a settlement. As usual, the public will be kept in the dark and fed bullshit about it. Faux will proudly claim it did nothing wrong but settled just to be done with it. In fact, Faux will have settled to make it go away, leave loyal Faux viewer's feng shui calm and comfortable, profits coming in and lies and slanders going out. For liars and anti-democracy authoritarians and fascists, it's a win-win. For democracy supporters and inconvenient truth, it's a lose-lose. 

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From the shocked but clueless commentator files: Juan Williams, a friend of Clarence Thomas is shocked, shocked mind you: An opinion The Hill published comments:

I consider Clarence Thomas a friend, and I’m shocked by recent reports

The smell of financial corruption around Thomas is now stronger than the longstanding fear that his votes on the high court are dictated by his hatred of the liberals who put him through painful nomination hearing dominated by Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment.

The smell of financial favors is also now stronger than puzzlement about Thomas’s unyielding loyalty to a hardline Republican agenda that made former President Trump call Thomas his favorite justice.

Thomas’s one-sided rulings on guns, abortion and race have long provoked critics who suggest he is motivated by something other than the facts, legal precedent, and fair application of a 236-year-old Constitution to life in contemporary America.

But even with this partial awakening by Williams, he still frames it favorably for Thomas. Williams spins it by saying that Thomas merely failed to appreciate the “limiting influence on his thinking” that came from cavorting with far-right players, e.g., the Nazi billionaire Harlan Crow. 

Limiting influence? How about corrupting influence? 

What is wrong with radical right people? They are cognitively broken. Even when they occasionally see inconvenient truth, they cannot accept it. To assuage their cognitive dissonance, they frame inconvenient reality to soften the blow to their fragile egos. That's wuss to say the least.