And Fox Shall Have No Dominion

Posted a response to the settlement of Dominion vs. Fox News on the Substack Wednesday, a little bit depressed along with Steve, and forgot to notify you all here, immersed as I was in the vileness of Milo and Ali and the rest of them, but anyhow it's at the above link, and I think it's got at least half an idea that might be of interest, and to which I might return sometime. If you haven't seen it, you could have a look.

Also on the Substack, a little housekeeping info: I'm still not completely sure what I want to do with it, or exactly why, except that it has to do with the broader project of detaching myself from the Twitter, as Elmo's mismanagement gets to be more and more of a problem—in the latest, celebrating his favorite holiday of 4/20, he took away all the blue checkmarks of verification from those who were verified, while keeping it for the marks who had ponied up $8, so now they are all like the imperial cronies who purchased baronies on the cheap from Napoleon III, so that the check is now literally an indication that the possessor is nobody, like the unfortunate Mr. Turd:

Ad Insult to Injury

The trial of Fox News for its relentless defamation of Dominion Voting Systems was supposed to be starting this morning, but the opening got postponed for 24 hours, which I guess means the parties are looking at the possibility of a settlement (some radio reporter thought that damages could be lowered from $1.6 billion to $1 billion even, but that the real sticking point for Fox would be Dominion's demand for a public admission of wrongdoing and apology by each of the offending shows). Meanwhile...

Fox News full page ad in NYT this AM on public trust as it seeks to settle ten-figure defamation suit on eve of jury trial pic.twitter.com/MyhbgbSbrg

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 17, 2023

Those are some pretty peculiar numbers, as several people were quick to point out, and pretty mysterious as well. You'll note the indication at the bottom says the poll is from 2023, but YouGov hasn't published a version of that poll in 2023, and the last time they did it, in April 2022, they had radically different results, with ABC and CBS both at 38%, CNN at 36%, and Fox News at 30% (MSNBC was at 28%, if you want to know).

In fact, it looks like the thing pictured in the ad isn't the YouGov poll of a representative sample of American adults as we know it at all; as the indication at the bottom clarifies, it's from a different division of the company, YouGov Profiles, which offers business clients analyses of their customer base:

Liberal Bias

Certified demonstrative leftist journalist Mehdi Hasan on TV having a kind of fight with NPR's certified defender of Fortress Neutrality David Folkenflik refusing to tell Mehdi what he wanted to hear on the subject of the not exactly shocking revelations from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News,   that Fox's stars were knowingly peddling bullshit after the 2020 presidential election—who'd have thunk!?

The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

The really interesting part of the story, which Folkenflik was laying on pretty thick, was that Fox's insane coverage of the Big Election LIe was driven pretty much entirely by business considerations, not ideological ones: after the excitement of Election Night, when Fox (correctly) called Arizona for Biden, launching the (correct) narrative of Biden's overwhelming victory over Trump, which of course enraged Trump himself and became a central theme on his Twitter, the Fox powers began to worry that they were alienating their audience, poetntially driving viewers to the outlets with even lower standards than their own, Newsmax and OAN, and possibly even threatening the share price!

For the Record: Quiet Part Update

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, Belleau, when it actually is rainy. Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe, via Bloomberg.

Interesting bit of disinformation formation  going on around the unlovely figure of former national security adviser John Bolton, from The Hill

John Bolton says he didn't hear Trump insult fallen soldiers in France

to Fox

It appears the anti-Trump memoir from former national security adviser John Bolton is undercutting a bombshell report from The Atlantic that laid out damning claims against President Trump and his canceled 2018 visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France.

and around the bend to The Federalist, which is ready to assert that Bolton has proved the allegations are false

The opening to the much-discussed Atlantic article, and the same events as described in John Bolton's memoir. https://t.co/1PQQXY8eoJ pic.twitter.com/JS32FJx9Ez

— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 4, 2020

But it struck me that there was something missing there, like, why would Trump have been talking about this to Bolton in particular?

You thought he was nuts: Update

pic.twitter.com/0a25gApyJ6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2018

In comments to the post the other day, we got into the question of the president's new Twitter thing, where they post short videos of him yelling for a camera in the Rose Garden (the most recent example above), who was doing it and what it was about. It turns out, Olivia Nuzzi reports at New York, this is a knowable thing:

On August 18, he yelled about manufacturing and, later that day, he yelled about meeting with foreign leaders. On August 22, he yelled about the stock market. And on August 24, he yelled about the economy. The resulting video clips, which range from 23 to 60 seconds in length, are like stream-of-consciousness infomercials for the flimsy concept of #AIGGADW (America Is Getting Great Again, Don’t Worry). With his hands conducting dramatically at his sides, he began the first episode like this: “Made in America is back! Now, some people would say ‘Made in the USA’ —I personally don’t care. The fact is, we’re back.”

According to — I swear to God — five current and former officials from both Donald Trump’s White House and campaign as well as one former official from the Trump Organization, the purpose of this on-camera exercise is simple: It makes him feel (and, he believes, look) good. It’s also a reminder of a freer time in his life, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, when he first perfected the cockeyed art of digital media virality with an off-the-cuff series of videos called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump and Ask the Donald.

My bold.

Only the chatter

One of approximately two known photographs depicting Donald Trump using a computer, from Motherboard. He seems to think one plays it by waving at it, like a theremin.

For the record, Donald J. Trump did not Google himself; he still doesn't know how to use a browser. This morning's terrifying tweets (which he entered at some incredible hour like 3 or 4 AM, and then deleted, redoing them, or having somebody else redo them, as a properly constituted threadlet, a little after 8:00)—

....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018

—are based on a piece by Paula Bolyard in PJ Media, datelined 25 August,  after she Googled "Trump" in the news tab, nominally showing that Google's algorithm is darkly influenced by Democratic math I should say a lot of sources suggested this, but none of them gave s link, so I'm not going to try to credit them):

For the Record: Pompeo Seeks Peace

Montage by Alice Wielinga/Time.

Speaking of North Korea, I think I may have just noticed something significant, stimulated by a Twitter friend:

I imagine Trump's demanding that people stop calling him a loser from the Singapore summit. Fox ran a story on DPRK missile plant expansion July 2 https://t.co/vYFuaEYTuC, state department announced Pompeo trip July 2 https://t.co/ePU0QsFhww

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2018

Namely, as you see, that Fox's first story on how North Korea was not doing anything to "denuclearize" and was in fact going back to building up forces appeared on the same day as the State Department announcement that Pompeo was going back for a visit to Pyongyang. And the next day that Trump tweeted for the last time (so far) on the subject:

Couldn't stop listening to this

So I thought I'd post it.

Fox & Friends accidentally said this about the Singapore summit: "regardless of what happens in that meeting between the two dictators."

This gaffe is probably the most honest thing ever said in the program's history. pic.twitter.com/eooBanu9b2

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) June 10, 2018

Literary Corner: I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn't exist

Mainstream media are concerned, inevitably, by the eccentricities of President Trump's call-in to the Fox & Friends show yesterday morning, in which he seemed to be growing more and more out of control as the half-hour wore on, and Doocy, Earhardt, and Kilmeade looked increasingly alarmed, until he finally began complaining, "I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn't exist."

Upon which they decided they'd better get him off the line, eventually shoving him away a little brutally when he didn't get the message ("We could talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do") and Trump was able to hang up, turn his own TV back on, and crawl under the covers.

Worried about health of Pres Trump. C/S John Kelley needs to get him off-line and get a week rest. Phone call to FOX News very troubling. Has three years left in Office. POTUS has immense legal authority. An unstable Pres is not good for the American people.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) April 27, 2018

But here at Rectification Central we have another way of looking at it, of course, taking its point of departure with the form of what Trump says, as in the bit two thirds of the way in or so after he's moved on from North Korea and "Sleepy Eyes" Chuck Todd to the discussion of CNN and its "council of seven people and of the seven people every one of them is against me," and this startling exchange:

President Trumplin is Watching the Tube

"Old Man Watching TV". Bronze by Richard Matzkin, via Reiné Gadellaa.

A statement by the President: pic.twitter.com/kAIwEUXzGM

— Real Press Sec. (@RealPressSecBot) June 19, 2017

"Have to skip the daily briefing, guys--one of my lawyers is on TV!!!" https://t.co/dBHCKv5NcB

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 19, 2017

Poem below the fold:

Why did the White House deny Trump got the idea from watching TV?

Maybe because he didn't. But then...

Couch Potato–in-Chief: Image via Daily Beast: 

As the drama of yesterday's US attorney firings progressed, one of the things you had to keep thinking about was the firings of eight US attorneys by George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales in 2006, for their refusal to join in the prosecution of fake "voter fraud" cases at the urging of the Department of Justice and vile worm Hans von Spakovsky.

OK, it wasn't at all the same thing—this week's massacre is at the beginning of a presidential term, when it's normal for all the working US attorneys to leave, and half of them have already done so. The odd thing is that the Trump administration is so peremptory and almost violent in ordering them out, not only not allowing them to wrap up the cases they're currently working on and waiting until they have successors lined up, which would be the normal procedure since the Clinton administration, but demanding that they vacate the physical office space by the end of the working day.

Mr. Murdoch, Tear Down This Monica!

Fox's Monica Crowley could be this week's Stupidest Person on the Internet:

At the Berlin Wall last week. Walls work. pic.twitter.com/2N3B4IUhbj

— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) October 5, 2015

.@MonicaCrowley Yes indeed. Illegals from Cologne and Düsseldorf were overrunning German Democratic Republic stealing the socialist jobs.

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2016

And some of them, I'm sure, were good people.

.@MonicaCrowley "I know," said Ulbricht, "Let's build a wall! The Wessies will pay for it!"

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2016

The thing being, you know, that it was meant to keep people in. And while it did work pretty well for 18 years, it ended up bringing down the thing that built it.

Panther Justice

Baby panther, via.

Did anybody call Andrea Tantaros out to clarify what she meant?

"He didn't enforce the laws on Obamacare," Tantaros said. "He was droning terrorists without a trial while he was giving them trials in downtown Manhattan. He ran the DOJ much like the Black Panthers would. That is a fact."

It is? I mean, how would the Black Panthers run the Justice Department?

Cheap shots and a touch of the sublime

Hath not dry ice eyes? Hath not dry ice hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? No? Well, what the hell then? Image from Dallas Morning News.

A Princeton professor who CBNC billed as an “industry expert” on the climate said this week that scientists were demonizing carbon dioxide “like the poor Jews under Hitler” in order to perpetrate a global warming hoax.

Cheap shots and fashion tips

With Oscar Peterson leading and Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Louie Bellson.

Via Crooks & Liars:

Fox News media analyst Lauren Ashburn on Sunday suggested that former prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl could be a Taliban sympathizer because he was released after five years of captivity wearing a Muslim "smock."

Cheap shots: Give me Linzertorte or give me death

Marble macarons by Unlimited Curiosity at DeviantArt.

Bloody tyranny reported by the Lonely Conservative:

FOOD, POLITICS

White House Pastry Chef Quits Thanks To Michelle Obama

by Lonely Conservative • March 19, 2014 • 1 Comment

White House pastry chef Bill Yosses has turned in his resignation because First Lady Michelle Obama changed his job duties. The openly gay chef was hired in 2007 by former First Lady Laura Bush to make cookies and sugar sculptures. (Wait, I thought all Republicans hate gay people? Oh, never mind.) Then Michelle came along.

Breaking: Talking Head Shows Up on Television

Lopez Discusses Obama’s Policies against the Catholic Church as He Preps to Meet Pope Francis

By NRO Staff

For reals: Kathryn Jean Lopez appears (briefly) on Fox News. Why is this headline so small?

Polar bear facepalm, via Paco Enterprises.

Cheap shots and extreme shrieking

Secrets of Glenn's success:

Greenwald: "Extreme hackery", "endless shrieking" made me what I am today.

Extreme hackery: Democrats, who shrieked endlessly about NSA during Bush, now most pro-NSA group of anyone http://t.co/HygELQJnTA
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2013

@firetomfriedman Depends what Dems you mean - my platform was pretty much built by liberal bloggers linking constantly to my NSA work
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2013

Hey, you're welcome. Any time you need me shrieking and hacking so you can advance your career another step, pal. 'Coz everybody really loves being treated as an asshole by the person they essentially created.

The Shrieking Affliction. From Magic: The Gathering, via.

Lamar!  and Leviticus! and more below the fold:

Sunday Obamacare martyr

Art by Jimmy Ernst, from WikiPaintings.

See, See Rider, 1946.

Today's Obamacare victim is Betsy Tadder, 52, of Rockton, Illinois, an over-the-border suburb of Janesville, Wisconsin who told Fox News that her current health insurance plan is being canceled as of December 13:

Right now, she pays $454 a month for health insurance, and the cheapest plan being offered as a replacement costs $871, she said. Tadder explained that the new plan includes benefits she doesn't need, like pediatric dentistry and maternity coverage.

Essentially, the government is telling her that her current plan is not good enough. [jump]

Greta van Susteren fails her Turing test!

You know those CAPTCHA devices?

A CAPTCHA (an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. The most common type of CAPTCHA was first invented by Mark D. Lillibridge, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Z. Broder. This form of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. Because the test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human, a CAPTCHA is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test. (Wikipedia)

Turns out that's the trouble with the healthcare.gov website, according to Fox's Greta van Susteren: she couldn't get past it.

Yes, folks, Obamacare doesn't allow robots to get insurance on the Marketplace exchange, and apparently Greta is—well—apparently Greta is a robot.*

*Or just hasn't ever seen a CAPTCHA before—at Fox they have servants to take care of that stuff.