Right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman’s robocalls targeting Black voters violated the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act — and the question isn’t close enough to require a jury, a federal judge ruled.[The judge said that] the evidence “establishes that the neighborhoods that Defendants targeted were not accidental or random,” finding that a reasonable jury couldn’t escape the conclusion that the pair wanted to “deny the right to vote specifically to Black voters.”
Recorded by a woman identifying herself as “Tamika Taylor,” the robocalls largely targeted diverse regions with the false message that “if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants, and [will] be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debt.”
Though Wohl and Burkman painted themselves as “goofballs and political hucksters with an irreverent sense of humor,” Judge Marrero rejected that the robocalls were “mere hyperbole.”
If the Republican Supreme Court takes this case up, it will try to find a way to let these two Republican vote fraudsters off the hook on free speech grounds. After all, Republicans use the law to protect their own and savage those they hate and politically oppose.
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Ukraine update: The NYT writes: “Russia Lacks Firepower to Keep Advancing, U.S. Intelligence Chief Says.”
That’s not credible. Maybe it will be credible when it happens. Another pulse check in six months might to shed enough fact-based light on this to come to a reasonably fact-based opinion.
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The WaPo writes: “Russia fires barrage of hypersonic missiles, piercing Ukrainian air defenses.”
Russia continues happily to pulverize Ukraine into the stone age.
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Morally bankrupt American military: The NYT writes: “Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court. American military leaders oppose helping the court investigate Russians because they fear setting a precedent that might help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans.”
Biden and State Department want to turn the evidence over. The US military fears prosecutions of its personnel. If the Pentagon stopped doing things that create liability for prosecutions, this would not be a concern.
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From the Pissed Off Catholics Files: The WaPo writes about an investigation it launched into this odd story: “A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country. The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal .... The use of data is emblematic of a new surveillance frontier in which private individuals can potentially track other Americans’ locations and activities using commercially available information. No U.S. data privacy laws prohibit the sale of this data.”
Personal privacy online is just about non-existent. How many priests will get axed from this little fishing expedition is an interesting question.
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From the Snarky Columnist Files: A WaPo opinion by Alexandra Petri opines, snarking on the Faux News and Tucker Carlson spinning the 1/6 coup attempt into a harmless, fat-free nothingburger:
I got an advance transcript of Tucker Carlson’s next several shows, operating under the same premise as his recently released, selectively edited Jan. 6 coverage! It follows.
Viewers! For too long, Big Paleontology and the mainstream media have lied to you, saying that the planet was hit by a meteorite that caused dinosaurs to go extinct. That’s what they want you to think. But I’ve looked at the footage and — it’s just not the case. For the overwhelming, vast majority of the time that dinosaurs were walking around on Earth, there’s not a single meteorite to be seen.Mostly, the dinosaurs were not impacted by a meteorite, actually. Finally, someone with the courage to say it. It makes you wonder: What else are they keeping from us?Next, we will observe footage that reveals Abraham Lincoln was mostly not assassinated — I have almost an hour of footage of him enjoying a theater performance without incident! And footage showing that for the overwhelming majority of his life, Elvis was alive. Next, lots of footage of the Hindenburg flying without a single problem! Makes you wonder who stood to gain by painting it as a disaster!
Faux News and Carlson are doubling down and saying the 1/6 coup attempt was peaceful and lawful. They have to double down or lose audience share. For Faux, as we all know, concern for profit is first, while truth is a distant third behind 2nd place audience share.
Tucker showing the peaceful patriotism
of the 1/6 coup attempt
