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:

Brand Coherence

Joe Biden approved this message.

Over at Steve's they're talking about these darn mild-mannered Democrats who never say anything mean and those terrific Republican rat bastards Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt and Dr. Bill Kristol who tell it like it is with their Lincoln Project and show us how the pros do it and why can't we have some more of that inside the party and I just don't know.

You know where.

I do know I specifically don't want Joe Biden to go around pretending to be a mean person, if only because—duh—he's not going to do it very well. And we're stuck with him, if you want to look at it that way, so there's not much point. But he has his virtues too, and they aren't doing too badly, if you've been looking at the polls. He's consistently ahead, 9.2 percentage points today, with an absolute majority (51.8% to Trump's 43.1%), meaning that even if the election were held today and Trump got all the undecided votes Biden would still have a majority (as we know that doesn't mean winning the presidency, but Samuel Tilden in 1876 was the only candidate who ever lost that way, with an edge of 50.9%, and it wasn't the Electoral College but his party literally selling him out), but that's not happening:

It's National Review time!

Scandalized National Review writer hears about young people thinking Harry Potter could have spiritual significance https://t.co/KysOFB2HNB pic.twitter.com/0oGtEc8IRS

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2017

With a capital t and that rhymes with p and that stands for poetic imagination pic.twitter.com/ncaHdwIbmL

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2017

From an intern called Jeff Cimmino kvetching about a podcast by a couple of Harvard Divinity School graduates and their "weekly church-like service for the secular focusing on on a Potter text's meaning" who is worried about the Death of God and links to Nietzsche to make it clear how upset he is. (Little imagining, I suppose, how much of the books is devoted to a serious and ultimately consoling meditation on death, the deaths of those we love and then our own. But missing Jesus, of course, so WTAF, amirite?)

Drawing by David Hughes for Esquire, October 2007.

And then from the other, libertine side of the Movement, this: