Hollywood, On the Front Lines of the Fight with AI

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Marilyn Monroe Desktop 4K resolution High-definition television High-definition video, marilyn monroe, celebrities, computer, girl png | PNGWing

While it may not look like it ,I really am trying to reduce the amount of time I waste thinking about You Know Who and his cult of white nationalist paranoiacs. It’s summer in America and there are so many other villains worthy of my interest.

Take for example the on-going-and-now-getting-truly-serious strike(s) in Hollywood. Yesterday the TV industry announced the four million awards it will give out at the Emmys, a show which might not even happen because of the current writers strike. Then, last night, the Screen Actors Guild announced it too is prepared to strike, as early as today, which means that everything in movies will shut down. The two Guilds have never before gone on strike simultaneously, so it is, as Ron Burgundy likes to say, kind of a big deal.

There are all sorts of issues that are arcane and eye-glazing, many dealing with giving writers — aka the people who thought up and produced the idea for the show/movie — a fair cut of the dough that the movie makes as the years roll on. But, as everyone following the conflict knows quite well, the single issue that is most motivating writers, and now actors, is the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence. No bullshit /journalist podcaster Kara Swisher has plenty to say about the movie industry predicament re: AI, and of course Ezra Klein at The New York Times has been on a tear about AI in general for months.

Never mind that AI is very real, very much here already and increasing in sophistication practically by the hour. With Donald Trump and his MAGA morons sponging up 90% of the country’s attention, few are giving it the focus it needs.

But … Hollywood is. TV and movie writers, some of whom are successful and rich and many who are not, recognize the ease with which they can be replaced by computer programs, as long as the mission of the big company in charge of production, be it Disney or Amazon or Apple, is satisfied with what I’ll politely call “familiar” or “traditional” storytelling. AI, as it exists today, quite masterfully collects and collates themes, types of characters and styles of dialogue into scripts unrecognizable from what humans produce. So, “Why bother with all these pissy, whiney, expensive writers?” you might say if you’re the CEO of Amazon or Disney.

The hard irony here is that there is a logic to the boss’s argument, as long as all you want to fill your program schedule is the 2000th variation on “Two Broke Girls”, another re-re-boot of “Lord of the Rings”, the next “Star Wars” step child or any rom-com you can think of. All the elements for that, um, “familiar” type of programming is in the computer hard drive and ready for instant replication — with strategic variations — by, you know, Amazon or Netflix’ on board HAL 9000 computer.

Things are much different, and tough for AI if you tell it to produce a story with dialogue and ideas no one has ever heard before. (I wonder if AI could ever produce something like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror.) But, folks, it’s show biz. Giving the people what they want is just another way of saying, “Give them what they’ve already seen and liked before.”

So yeah, the writers are in a tough place.

But actors too are quickly realizing that they are replaceable as well. Imagine, for example, ChatGPT 9 in 2031, or whatever, commanded to collect, scour and digest every film and every interview Marilyn Monroe gave in her career and reproduce her in near perfect detail in an entirely new production, maybe opposite, say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the supporting cast? Are you prepared to say something like that could never happen?

In my more macabre imaginings I think of Oliver Stone, or one of his acolytes, re-staging Dallas 11/22/63 with perfect AI-created doubles of JFK, Jackie, LBJ and the whole cast of historical characters, to the point the camera/audience is in the limo rolling through Dealey Plaza. Point being, AI will be able to create almost anything that can be imagined … and without a human actor or screenwriter to be paid $20 million per film plus residuals.

I have no idea how the Hollywood strikes will end. (Swisher’s Pivot podcast partner Scott Galloway believes the unions have been badly misled and lack and serious leverage.)

But as with several other vital cultural issues over the past century — anti-semitism, racism, gay rights, etc. — El Lay is at the tip of the spear fighting something that’s coming, one way or another, for all of us.

How Unlikely Is It That It’ll Be Trump v. Biden in ’24?

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Biden vs. Trump 2024 would be the rematch nobody wants

I believe I have previously mentioned my fanboy enthusiasm for the work of Mark Leibovich, formerly of The New York Times Magazine and now, like just about every other four star journalist/writer, at The Atlantic. Leibovich’s classic book is “This Town” a truly “inside” view of the D.C. cocktail party/power culture, where politicians, lobbyists and big name journos regularly-to-constantly schmooze, clink glasses and incestuously buff up each other’s bona fides. It was as hilarious as it was dismaying.

His most recent, “Thank You for Your Servitude”, released last fall, was all about the truly craven GOP toadies — can you say Lindsey Graham fast enough? — who have taken out triple mortgages on what little soul they ever had to defend Donald Trump on everything he’s ever said or done. Which means committing character suicide five times a day.

Anyway, Leibovich being Leibovich with his Times/Atlantic pedigree, gets all sorts of people who really should know better to talk to him. And almost all play laughable word games to lay out their imagined resolution for what we’ll call “the Trump problem.” A chaotic epoch that nearly all of them wish would end … like yesterday … no matter how much they defend him publicly.

What Leibovich leaves for his punchline conclusion is that there is actually a detectable consensus, though only a couple party pros dare say it out loud.

And that is … they wish (and hope) the guy just up and dies. Face first into a bucket of KFC wings. Whatever.

You laugh. But they’re serious. I ask you, what do you think mouldering stalactites like Mitch McConnell really think is their best way out of the constant Trump quagmire?

This all came to mind again the other day when a couple of us were talking about the last time the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were set a year and a half or more before the election? How far back do you have to go in our lifetimes? Adlai Stevenson and Ike in ’56? In every other election cycle the presumptive tickets shifted significantly over the 18 to 24 month “home stretch.”

And yet … here we are in June of 2023, 16 months before the next election and the hardened assumption is that our choices will again be Trump and Joe Biden. One guy is 81 and while competent moves like a guy who is, well, 81. Opposite him is a guy, nigh onto morbidly obese and demonstrably erratic mentally, who has just turned 77 and is under more legal pressure than John Gotti, with indictments piling up faster than tickets on an overparked delivery van in lower Manhattan. (I have personal experience with that one.)

My point here is to warn against certainty in this situation and prepare contingencies.

Trump looks strong. He is making his usual boatload of money off the Mar-a-Lago indictment. (And again, what is in anyone’s mind who writes a $50 check to a guy who says he’s a billionaire?) His poll numbers vis a vis Ron DeSantis and the other GOP munchkins remain daunting. Sixty-plus percent of Republican voters say they believe he won the 2020 election. He looks invincible, and as we all know, could campaign all next year wearing an ankle bracelet. (Hell, he could sell replicas at his MAGA merch tables.)

But … it is very hard to imagine Trump bears up physically under the stresses that are compounding by the hour. And mentally … well, he’s Trump. But as some have pointed out, a big part of his appeal to his celebrity-obsessed base is that he’s “fun” or at least “entertaining”, two, um, virtues less evident with every droning, monotonous, whiny speech, like the buzz-killer he delivered in Bedminister after this week’s indictment.

Thankfully, his main competition over in the Pissed Off White Victim bubble is De Santis who has all the charm and entertainment appeal of a medieval executioner.

And Biden … well, face it. 81 is 81 and serious things regularly happen to 81 year-olds with the best health care money can provide. What happens with even a minor stroke? Or some other age-related infirmity? Should Biden be so incapictated he’s unable to run, try imagining the Democratic scramble — even this month, much less next summer or later, to produce another unifying candidate. Kamala Harris? Mmmm, I kinda doubt it. Mayor Pete? Gavin Newsom? Bernie?

Minus Trump, how do you assess a DeSantis match up against Biden? How many “swing voters” would reflexively gravitate back to the young, smarter, more disciplined, Trumpy-but-not-Trump Republican? Would his cynical, cro-magnon policies like that six-week abortion ban and all-the-guns-you-can-eat really deter critical suburban women?

I don’t know, but because I embrace the gloom, it’s stuff I think about.

Have a nice day.

Is Minnesota Really A “Big Spending” State?

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This past winter and spring, the DFL-controlled state House, Senate, and Executive branch produced much more for ordinary families than Republicans ever did when they were in power.  It’s not close.

As a result, things are getting heady for Walz and DFL legislators. To cite just one example of the national acclaim they’re getting, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne recently lavished praise on the Minnesota DFL’s 2023 legislative tour de force with a sloppy wet kiss of a column.

“The avalanche of progressive legislation that the state’s two-vote Democratic majority in the Minnesota House and one-vote advantage in the state Senate have enacted this year is a wonder to behold.

It’s no wonder former president Barack Obama tweeted recently: ‘If you need a reminder that elections have consequences, check out what’s happening in Minnesota.’

Democrats in the state are known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from their merger with a third party in the 1940s. True to the name, the party’s agenda combined social concerns such as abortion rights with what Long called “bread-and-butter, populist things that sell everywhere in the state.”

Well, E.J., thanks to the rural-urban division that the Minnesota Republican Party relentlessly promotes on the campaign trail, the DFL achievements don’t actually sell well “everywhere” in the state.  According to an early May 2023 KSTP-TV/Survey USA poll, Walz still has much lower approval ratings in rural parts of the state (51% in the southern region, 42% in the western region, and 46% in the northeastern region) than he has in the Twin Cities seven-county metropolitan area (60% approval).

Still, Governor Walz’s 2023 performance is selling relatively well statewide. He has the approval of 54% of Minnesotans, compared to the disapproval of 41%. In a purple state that Trump only lost by 1.5 points in 2016, Walz’s 13-point net positive approval rating is impressive. Progressivism is selling pretty well in this purple state.

However, the political debate is just heating up. We can expect Republicans campaigning in 2026 to focus on the unpopular, vague notion of “government spending increases,” rather than the DFL’s specific policy changes.  After all, polls show that individual DFL-enacted achievements are popular. For instance, 80% of Americans support paid family and medical leave, 80% of Americans support more child care assistance for families, 76% of Minnesotans support universal background checks for gun purchases, and 69% of Americans support more school funding, to name just a few of the many popular policies that DFLers passed during the 2023 session. Therefore, Republicans will focus on how much more the DFL-controlled state government is spending, not the DFL’s signature policy achievements.

It is true that the state budget is increasing under DFLers in 2024. But is state government spending really that high?

According to usgovernmentspending.com, state spending in Minnesota in 2024 will be 10.15% of the state’s GDP, making it a middling 25th among the 50 states. Yawn.

So, sure, our Republican-controlled “race-to-the-bottom” neighbors in Iowa (9.87% of GDP), Wisconsin (9.64% of GDP), North Dakota (9.08% of GDP), and South Dakota (8.12% of GDP) are spending less than in Minnesota. No surprise there.

But state spending in Minnesota is nothing like what is happening annually in the top ten states of New Mexico (17.64%), Alaska (16.96%), West Virginia (16.42%), Vermont (16.12%), Hawaii (15.88%), Kentucky (15.18), Oregon (15.14%), Mississippi (14.94%), Louisiana (13.78%), and Maine (13.51%).

Despite Minnesota Republicans’ red-faced hyperbole about the DFL’s “out of control spending,” in a national context Minnesota is, meh, just average. 

CNN’s Chris Licht, Yet Another Example of How Everything Trump Touches Dies.

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A week ago, reading Tim Alberta’s 15,000 word Atlantic piece on the tribulations of CNN exec Chris Licht, I kept shaking my head and saying, “This isn’t survivable.” In a rare moment of foresight (for me) I was quickly proven correct. Days later Licht was “let go” and CNN was “moving on.”

What made the story unsurvivable wasn’t just the reporting on CNN’s ratings problem or even Licht’s handling of the absurdly problematic town hall with Donald Trump, although that is very much connected, as much as it was the portrait of a much too generic corporate functionary in way over his head in terms of dealing with his primary resources, namely the anchors, reporters and staff at CNN. Had Licht been wheeled in to shore up the quarterly earnings statement at Road Runner Acme Explosives, Inc. he might still be in charge. But not when his mission was to sell a “reset” of journalistic tone and focus to hundreds of professionals whose primary skill set involves recognizing the pungent odor of bullshit.

Others have focused on all variety of details in the extraordinarily well reported piece, but Alberta — formerly at Politico and a guy with deep sources within what used to be your father’s Republican party — correctly placed particular focus on Licht’s determination to apply the concept of “absolute truth” to CNN’s presentation of the news. Alberta presses him several times on what … exactly … that means … “absolute truth?”

Chris Licht

Licht had no good answer. As Generic Corporate Man, Licht was groomed and installed by David Zaslav the current head of recently reconfigured Warner Brothers-Discovery + and himself answerable to Colorado billionaire John Malone, long-serving board member and, FWIW, the second largest land owner in the United States. If you’re scoring at home, Malone — a classic old school Republican — wasn’t pleased with CNN’s persistent hyper-critical tone toward Trump, and put his energies into getting Zaslav his job with the clear instructions to restore CNN to something like partisan neutrality, which largely determind Zaslav’s choice of Licht. (I’ll leave aside for the moment that Zaslav, paid $165 million annually, is widely viewed as Voldemort in the current strike by TV writers. Generic, AI-style scripted TV being acceptable as long as those quarterly numbers hold up.)

David Zaslav Doubles Down on Theatrical Movies at CinemaCon - Variety
David Zaslav

Point being here that this generic/neutrality shtick/vision from Malone (and other board members) which begat Zaslav which begat Licht was nakedly obvious to CNN’s employees. As Alberta and others now tell the story, rebalancing objectivity wasn’t the issue for CNN’s staff. There was acceptance of the idea of dialing back the constant Trump rage. But Licht appeared clueless about how to do that given the, um, pesky journalistic, reality-based facts at hand.

The 'King of Cable' Behind a Charter-Time Warner Cable Deal - The New York Times
John Malone

What Licht couldn’t articulate to his news team was how … exactly … do you report on so prominent a public, political figure as Trump, and those who so ardently supprt him, without reporting, objectively and accurately, with a commitment to something approaching absolute truth, that he’s a fraud and a liar as well as criminally incompetent?

Go ahead. Everyone’s listening. We’ll take notes.

Absolute truth: Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump says he didn’t. One is absolutely true, the other isn’t. Are we going to pretend both are?

This was and to some extent still is a serious issue for many levels of modern journalism, but particularly those still adherring to paradigms of reporting now wildly out-paced by characters and competitors for whom truth, absolute and otherwise, is first and foremost a sales game. What’s true is whatever the people will believe.

Back in 2016 I did a piece talking to local journalism profs and pros about injecting the word “lying” into reporting on then candidate Trump. The consensus was that “lying” should be applied only as a last resort and with full confidence of (Trump’s) intent, which of course no one could ever say, so in effect you never use the word “lying.”

That standard has clearly eroded over the ensuing seven and a half years, with even The New York Times, deploying “the ‘L’ word” … judiciously. Meanwhile, CNN, cable competitors like MSNBC and untold websites applied “lie”, “lies” and “lying” much more generously. Some would say “excessively”, though still not inaccurately or unfairly in the context of Trump.

The question for Licht and now for post-CNN and other news organizations still timorous about calling Trump and his hyper-partisan acolytes what they clearly/absolutely are, is how do you assert journalistic credibility when you decline to describe accurately and in the common vernacular what is so vividly apparent? What are you protecting yourself or your audience from?

Countless norms have been broken by Trump’s rampage across the international stage. The once sagacious concept of a balanced presentation of both sides of story, essentially communicating validity in both points of view, has taken a particularly brutal battering in The Age of Trump. Most reporters and most audiences are too smart, and have access to too many other venues of information, to see neutrality as an asset.

What they see instead is timidity, and often complicity.

Libertarians and The Volcanic Horror of Majority Rule

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D.J. Tice

I sometimes wish I was a better person. But kind of like the famous Pacino line from “Godfather III” things just keep pulling me back in … to my dark, snarky place where a fundamental weakness of character allows me to be amused by the frustration and rage of others.

Like, for example, Minnesota’s Republicans fuming over all the insane legislation “triumphalist” Democrats have “rammed down our throats” this session, which ends today, thankfully for them. (IMHO) Exhibit “A” of their frustration came to my attention on the letters page of the Star Tribune yesterday. Here were a handful of clearly literate readers objecting to a column by the paper’s Op-Ed eminence grise, Doug Tice, a week earlier.

Having missed that one I dialed it up and began reading … and laughing. Now Doug is not a bad guy. In fact, a couple hundred years ago he was once my editor. But he’s very much of the old school, board room libertarian vein of cultural perspective. It’s a peculiar, rarefied academy of people who affect an above the fray, apart-from-the-madding crowd stance that is highly dependent on sustaining the status quo.

So, in a piece titled, “National Popular Vote would be popular folly” Doug commits a cardinal sin for status quo libertarians … he lets you see him sweat. This popular vote thing has set off his smoke alarms.

The topic is something I’ve written about before and one I seriously doubt more than 5% of the general public has ever heard of … the National Popular Vote Compact. At its essence its a means by which, after 247 years of “democracy” the United States would finally elect Presidents by … wait for it … the expressed will of the majority. In other words, this “folly” would neuter the Electoral College, by which if you’ve been paying attention lately, we got George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Iraq war followed soon thereafter by the Donald Trump hellscape of incompetence, fraud and insurrection.

Never minding that the United States is a, um, somewhat different place than it was in 1787 when the Electoral College was adapted to protect the rights of all those … landed, primarily white male … farmers, Tice launches his piece with the line about “triumphalist DFLers running the show” here in otherwise common-sense Minnesota and sustains a steady slide of frustration from there on out.

Among my favorites in the “letting them see you sweat” category are cracks about:

… “a scheme to alter the US Constitution” (echoes of Sam Alito on that one),

… DFLers “indulging nearly every iconoclastic impulse” and engaging in “volcanic progressivism”, (or put another way, “delivering what they told voters they would do”/elections matter)

… the Compact being “a fashionable liberal enthusiasm,” (a bit like conservatives reaching back to 16th century Europe to fortify an “originalist” interpretation of said Constitution)

… and how under this crazy, volcanic scheme the Compact would “introduce unprecedented instability and uncertainty into America’s basic political process” … unlike say the Supreme Court stepping in to hand the election to a guy by a partisan-line one-vote margin, or 70,000 votes across six states delivering unto us and the beloved Constitution a reality TV jackass who later suggested voiding that same Constitution to remain power … after coming up seven million short in the popular vote?

Common sense says you gotta preserve that kind of stability.

Tice goes on at great lengths to describe scenarios where, gasp! candidates might campaign hardest in places with … the most voters … and how Minnesota (and by extension, Wyoming and Kansas and Oklahoma) might not get as much attention as say, (insert hissing noises) California and New York.

As I say, knowing Doug a bit and following this Compact idea and the horror it inspires in conservatives who are well aware of their precarious hold on to minority rule in this country, I kept shaking my head and laughing. The candidate with the most votes wins? Insane! The (exclusively white, property-owning male) Fathers would never have agreed to such a thing!

In the end — for this session anyway — volcanic DFLers have delivered on dozens of promises they’ve made to Minnesota voters for decades, but until 2023 have been thwarted by Republicans. A crew who, if you look close, are currently operating with few if any credible policy goals — other than status-quo preserving obstruction.

But libertarians, with their dog-earred copies of Ayn Rand still tucked into their pilling cardigan pockets can take heart a while longer … the “real insurrection” of majority rule in the form of the National Popular Vote Compact needs several more state legislatures before it would take effect.

Surveys: DFLers Haven’t Overreached On Their Electoral Mandate

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Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota DFL state legislators are getting glowing national attention for passing an array of progressive changes in recent months.  NBC News recently reported:

Nearly four months into the legislative session, Democrats in the state have already tackled protecting abortion rights, legalizing recreational marijuana and restricting gun access — and they have signaled their plans to take on issues like expanding paid family leave and providing legal refuge to trans youths whose access to gender-affirming and other medical care has been restricted elsewhere.

“When you’re looking at what’s possible with a trifecta, look at Minnesota,” said Daniel Squadron, the executive director of The States Project, a left-leaning group that works to build Democratic majorities in state legislatures.

In fact, the Legislature passed more bills in its first 11 weeks of the current session than in the same time frame of every session since 2010, according to an analysis by The States Project.

To me, the lesson is clear: When voters in gridlocked purple states elect Democrats, Democrats deliver on changes that are popular with a majority of voters. However, Republicans who have blocked these same politics for decades see it differently. They’re crying “overreach.” And crying. And crying. And crying.

What’s “overreach?” Republicans claim “overreach” every time something passes the Legislature that they and their ultra-conservative primary election base oppose.  A more reasonable definition is passing something that a majority of all Minnesotans oppose, If DFLers are doing that, it would reasonable to conclude that they have gone beyond the electoral mandate they were given in November 2022. 

By that definition, DFLers aren’t overreaching.  For instance, survey data show that 67% of Minnesotans oppose abortion bans, and therefore presumably support DFL efforts to keep abortion legal in Minnesota in the post-Dobbs decision era. Likewise, gun violence prevention reforms are extremely popular with Minnesotans – 64% back red flag laws and 76% want universal background checks. Sixty percent of Minnesotans support legalizing marijuana for adults. Sixty-two percent support making school lunches free. Fifty-nine percent say everyone should receive a ballot in the mail.

I can’t find Minnesota-specific survey data on all of the other changes DFLers are making, but national polls give us a pretty good clue about where probably Minnesotans stand.  Given how overwhelming the size of the majorities found in the following national surveys, there’s no reason to believe that Minnesotans are on the opposite side of these issues: More school funding (69% of Americans support), a public option for health insurance (68% of Americans support), disclosing dark money donors to political campaigns (75% of Americans support), child care assistance for families (80% of Americans support), and paid family and medical leave (80% of Americans support). 

Granted, Minnesotans may be a few points different than national respondents on those issues. But it’s just not credible to believe that there isn’t majority support among Minnesotans on those issues.

The only issue where there might be a wee bit of overreach is on the restoration of the vote for felons.  While national polls find 69% support for restoring the vote for felons who have completed all of their full sentence requirements, including parole, that support might be a little weaker for restoring the vote before parole is completed, which is what DFLers passed. A survey of Minnesotans conducted by the South Carolina-based Meeting Streets Insights for the conservative Minnesota-based group Center for the American Experiment found only 36% support on this question:

“Currently in Minnesota, convicted felons lose their right to vote until their entire sentence is complete, including prison time and probation. Would you support or oppose restoring the right to vote for convicted felons before they serve their full sentence?”

I don’t suspect that restoration of the vote for felons is a top priority issue for the swing voters who decide close elections. Moreover, the strong 69% support found in surveys for restoring the vote after parole indicates that if DFLers are perceived to be “overreaching,” it likely will be viewed by swing voters as a relatively minor one.  Republicans probably will try to characterize this as “a power grab to stuff ballot boxes with votes of convicted criminals” in the 2024 general election campaigns. But they won’t have much luck with that issue, beyond the voters who were already supporting them based on other issues.

I understand that the loyal opposition has to say something as DFLers hold giddy bill-signing celebration after celebration on popular issues. But survey data indicate that Republicans’ “overreach” mantra is, well, overreach.



Tucker Cost Fox More Than He Was Worth

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Comic: Claytoonz: Tucker Carlson canceled

I concede up front that what follows may well be a classic of the, “No duh” genre of punditry. But here goes, anyway.

Regarding Fox firing Tucker Carlson: Some way, some how this is mainly about money. We are after all talking Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp, a media empire that for 40-plus years has demonstrated no — as in zero — concern about reputational damage from spewing reckless sleaze, bigotry and flagrant disinformation. Carlson wasn’t fired because he embarrassed Fox.

His deep dives and happy wallows in all of his trademark racist and sexist ugliness could hardly have concerned Fox to the point that it would fire … it’s most profitable prime time host. He was, after all, following the implicit direction of the company’s business strategy.

Now, that said, the other edge of the sword with a “star” who has trafficked in gross transgressions against common social decency is that the bills for such behavior really do start to add up. As you may have followed in the wake of Fox’s $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Services, NewsCorp will be able to deduct a fat chunk of those damages on it’s taxes. (I know, I know. Like me, you’re wondering how Rupert Murdoch hasn’t long ago reduced his U.S. tax obligations to nothing.) But then — after the damages — there’s the premiums Fox will have to pay for the production insurance that covers some if not all of the Dominion settlement.

I haven’t been able to find anyone estimating what kind of increases we might be talking about here. But if I were the CFO of whatever company covers Fox, and I were forced to write a check for … hundreds of millions … to cover damages that should have been mitigated if not avoided entirely if the customer had effective management, I know my next move would be to hand them a premium increase worth five or ten times Carlson’s $20 million annual salary. Especially when you consider Smartmatic and all the other lawsuits queued up for pretty much the same corporate behavior.

Based on reporting from last night and this morning, there are suggestions that Carlson’s snarky shots at Fox managers like CEO Suzanne Scott, (who is, excuse me, fully culpable in everything that has gone on), is a factor in Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch souring on Carlson. But please, the guy was a major profit center. Who really cares if he slags his boss-in-name-only once in a while?

Personally, I’m more inclined to suspect that the Carlson redacted in those … hilarious … Fox internal e-mails/texts is more damaging than we can currently imagine. (See link above.) So damaging that Fox knows Smartmatic’s lawyers, who can use the Dominion depositions as a starting point, already have them boxed into a corner for a settlement larger than Dominion’s … with another thud of insurance premium increases to follow. Not to mention shareholder lawsuits.

Tucker Carlson leaving FOX News

There seems to be little doubt that Carlson had few fans within Fox corporate or its newsroom. The guy was out free ranging thanks to the cash he was bringing in from the audience of 3 million he guaranteed D-list advertisers night after night. But, as with Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly before him, at some point all the impunity big ratings buys you isn’t enough.

I never cease to love reminding people that Bill O’Reilly, once thought as untouchable as Carlson, paid one woman … $32 million out of his own pocket to settle her claims against him, claims that included, “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her.” And she, for the record, was one of six women Fox and O’Reilly paid off.

Point being that a sense of titanic impunity quite often leads to deeply squalid misbehavior, of a kind that creates very large bills for both aggressors and their employers.

With that in mind, I give you this from the suit Carlson’s former producer Abby Grossberg has filed against Fox.

Who replaces Carlson is a topic for another rant. But Fox’ business dilemma is clear and fascinating. Those three million loyal viewers, hungry for anything Fox tells them will not be satisfied with some old school Republican nattering on about capital gains and marginal tax rates. That crowd tunes in for the hysterical hellfire … a shtick that appears to be costing Fox/NewsCorp more and more money with every passing year and superstar host.

DeSantis “Anti-Woke” Agenda Falling Flat With Voters

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In 1910, writer Jack Johnson nicknamed white boxer James Jeffries the “Great white hope” as Jeffries prepared to fight the black fighter Jack Johnson.  Apparently, Mr. Jeffries represented something that many fans found discomforting about Mr. Johnson. 

Similarly in 2023, Republican elites are desperately searching for a Great Non-Trump Hope, sometimes quietly referred to as “Trump with a brain, “Trump without the crazy,” or “Trump without the chaos.”  Most Republicans have settled on the charismatically challenged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, fresh off his landslide reelection win over Democrat Charlie Crist.

At this point, a lot of Republican voters outside of Florida don’t know much about DeSantis. They know he’s not as undisciplined as Trump, and that he has handily won recent elections at a time when Trump has been regularly rejected by general election voters. 

But beyond presenting himself as a stable winner, DeSantis is pushing a set of extremist policies that appeal to anti-“woke” Republicans.  That may make sense as a primary election strategy, but how about as a general election strategy?  How popular will DeSantis’s Republican-friendly platform be with the all-important swing voters in battleground states?

Here DeSantis faces stiff headwinds, according to a recent University of North Florida survey. Remember, these toxic findings are from DeSantis’s home state, where he just won reelection by 19 points.

These numbers are jaw-dropping. If DeSantis wants to run ads promoting his stands on these issues, Democrats should offer to pay for them.

An overwhelmingly unpopular policy agenda isn’t even DeSantis’s biggest challenge. His more limiting political leg iron is that he can’t begin to match the Trump bombast and charisma that seems to be the primary driver of Trump’s enduring popularity with Republicans. That will become much more apparent as the primary campaign season heats up, once DeSantis and Trump start appearing on the same stage together. The man the former President belittles as “Tiny D” will shrink in that setting.

In other words, the problem with the pursuit of “Trump without the crazy” is that a majority of Republican primary voters adore “the crazy.”

DeSantis’s other problem is that even if he somehow finds a way to defeat Trump in the primary, and I don’t think he can, Trump’s brutal and relentless attacks will drive DeSantis’s unfavorability ratings sky-high, including on issues important to general election swing voters, such as DeSantis’s past efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.  Also, the possibility of a Trump third-party candidacy looms large.

DeSantis won’t look nearly as attractive facing general election voters in the spring of 2024 as he looked to Republican primary voters in the winter of 2023. And if Trump somehow loses the Republican endorsement, he will continue attacking DeSantis long after the primaries are over.  All the while, DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policy agenda will further sully him with general election swing voters, particularly suburban women, people of color, and young people.

All of which is to say, it ain’t easy being DeSanctimonius.

Lights! Camera! Places! The Trial of the Century!

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How the Fox News hosts show up in the Dominion lawsuit documents

With apologies to Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Gwyneth Paltrow and O.J. Simpson, the trial of the century, or the past 100 years begins Monday in Delaware. That’s when FoxNews, the prime purveyor of misinformation into our modern marketplace of ideas, has to explain why it was OK or “newsworthy” to defame Dominion Voting Systems in order to keep its ratings and revenue up.

I am not the only great legal mind baffled by the lack of a settlement in this case. Given the astonishing disclosures in the deposition/pre-trial phase, with popular Fox hosts chattering about how they “hate” Donald Trump, how “insane” the idea of a stolen election is, and how they have to keep up the dense screen of smoking bullshit to mollify their (none too bright?) viewers, how does anything get better in a court room when all the redactions are lifted and Sean Hannity … Sean Hannity … is put under cross examination?

I heard someone compare this trial — which may or may not be televised – more on that in a moment — to the 1925 Scopes/Monkey trial, where the legal system had to make a seismic judgment on the validity of evolution. (I can only imagine Hannity’s thinking on something as woke and science-y as that.) It’s a fair comparison.

There’s always a danger in over-blowing the importance of any legal event. But whether Fox is found guilty of recklessly and deeply cynically promoting a storyline lacking any evidence whatsoever — and certainly amplified the kind of rabid thinking that led to a deadly riot on the U.S, Capitol is, you know, kind of a bigger deal than if Johnny Depp was a drugged-out bastard or Gwyneth failed to get out of the way of a dude on a ski slope. This case is a bona fide cultural moment.

Theories and histories and courses are already being written and taught on the role Fox and other forums of right-wing transgressive entertainment have had on American culture. This trial, with Fox dealing from a very weak hand, has the potential to fully expose the shameless, naked cynicism of a wildly lucrative and influential enterprise … to those who choose to hear it.

As of today, Saturday, no decision has been made on media requests for the trial to be televised, a la Depp v Heard, or the People v O.J. or Derek Chauvin. It will be a startling decision if the request is denied.

I mean, could the people involved, from Rupert Murdoch on down through Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo and … Sean Hannity … be any more prominent public figures inspiring any greater legitimate public interest in how they defend what they presented … on television … to millions of credulous viewers? The answer is “no.”

The presiding judge has already made things more difficult for Fox by declaring that they can not argue that the near hourly infusion of steaming offal was “newsworthy” and therefore a legitimate journalistic effort on their part. (You know, let’s hear from both sides. You first and foremost, Rudy Giuliani.) The judge has also registered displeasure with Fox playing cute about Rupert’s role as some kind of out of touch figurehead of the operation with no day to day authority over what went on. (The judge has also ruled that the prosecution can’t draw lines from Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the Kraken lady, and what happened on January 6.)

As part of my prep work, reading up and listening to (abundant) punditry on the trial, I can offer the following.

1: It is likely it is Dominion, not Fox, who is refusing to settle, on the grounds that this case is so strong and that actual malice is so clearly evident. “You want to negotiate, Rupert? Our number remains a firm $1.6 billion, plus an on-air apology from Tucker Carlson.”)

2: If Fox loses this case, it will almost certainly keep on appealing, all the way to … wait for it … Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of the Supreme Court. The thinking being that this so clearly a defining, precedent-setting moment in First Amendment litigation and the privileges of journalism that it requires full and final judgment from … the highest and most incorruptible court in the land. (Expect Sam Alito to quote something from the Code of Hammurabi.)

3: Just as Fox is saying almost nothing about Clarence Thomas’ sleazy relationship with a billionaire, expect that the name of Bill Kennard will come up often, in court and on Fox’ prime time entertainment shows. Kennard is partner in the private equity crew that owns a majority share of Dominion Voting Systems, along with being a former Ambassador under Barack Obama, a contributor to both Obama and Bill Clinton as well as a board member for AT&T and a couple other mega corporations. Fox will not be able to resist trying to sell the idea that Kennard’s presence exposes just another woke, deep state, radical socialist, George Soros-inspired, ultra liberal attack on hard working truth tellers.

4: If Rupert Murdoch can’t get himself out of testifying based on his age and fragile health he’ll be key to dropping the guillotine blade on … others. I mean, the poor guy. He’s got to still be emotionally drained after e-mailing wife #3 that their marriage was over and dumping potential bride #4 for her religious zealotry. A guy like that can get on a private jet, hell, does Delaware even have a cement runway? But if he testifies, he will almost certainly spin the argument that those “others”, namely Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs actually believed the stuff he’s called “crazy” in conversations with Fox execs. How much do you figure those three are spendiong in legal fees these days?

5: Sans settlement, the trial could last several weeks. Weeks that the Fox audience will see precious little relating to the shameless perfidy of it’s most popular hosts, and plenty about how the justice system is rigged against free speech. Various scattered pundits, desperate for a contrarian angle on the progress of the trial, will clutch pearls and fret about the precedent this sets. Wild lawsuits against honest operations who try as best they can to get the story right, report accurately and quickly apologize for any inadvertent errors!

Ignore them. Those people are fools.

What makes the Fox – Dominion suit so fundamental and profound is that no other major television news corporation in history has gone so rogue with the journalism basics of truth telling as Fox News. They are a stark and colossal outlier to fair-mindedness and good faith.

If you’re in the news game, the only precedent you need to observe is not acting with malice in pursuit of making a buck, or a billion and a half bucks …annually … for years. … from an audience that doesn’t care if you’re lying to them.

Taxpayer-Subsidized Vikings Stadium Continues to Deliver Huge Returns for Billionaire Wilfs

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Eight years ago, the owners of the Minnesota Vikings, Zygy and Mark Wilf, paid about 21 percent of the cost of the new Vikings’ stadium.  At the time, an obscure socialist blogger described what we knew about the sweetheart cost-sharing arrangement:

Vikings PR people like to tell Minnesotans that the team’s owner, billionaire Zygi Wilf, is paying about 60 percent of the ever-growing $1.2 billion stadium cost.  

The truth, as Star Tribune/1500ESPN columnist Patrick Reusse pointed out back in May 2012, is that something like $450 million of the Wilf’s share will be paid by people other than the Wilfs. For instance, season ticket holders will be making exorbitant seat license payments to the Wilfs, the National Football League will be paying a subsidized “loan” to the Wilfs, and U.S. Bank will be making naming rights payments to the Wilfs.  All of this will offset the Wilf’s stadium costs by about $450 million

Taking all of that into consideration, Mr. Wilf looks to be shelling out more in the neighborhood of $250 million of his own money, or 21% of the cost of the $1.2 billion total, not the 60 percent the Vikings claim.  

It’s difficult for an outsider to come up with precise numbers, but that seems like a pretty fair, pardon the pun, ballpark estimate.

Taxpayers often subsidize infrastructure — roads, bridges, ports, rural broadband, community centers, etc. — that private companies can’t or won’t build on their own.  That makes good sense.

But should an NFL stadium be considered one of those things? Did the Wilfs really have so little to gain financially from a new stadium that they needed massive taxpayer subsidies? 

Vikings billionaire owner Zygi Wilf surveying the taxpayer gift that keeps on giving.
(Photo credit: Star Tribune)

Every year, we’re learning a bit more about just how much the Wilfs gained from this new stadium.  In 2005, the Wilfs paid about $600 million for the Vikings.  The last time Forbes did its estimates, the Vikings were thought to be worth $3.93 billion. 

To be sure, not all of this gain in team value is due to the stadium. But the stadium is certainly a substantial driver of increased valuation, and it’s never been more clear that NFL owners have more than enough financial wherewithal to fund their own revenue-generating assets.

By the way, the Wilfs’ money-making machine is just getting warmed up.  Last weekend, St. Paul Pioneer Press sports Columnist Charlie Walters speculated that this year Forbes will say the Vikings are valued at around $4.5 billion, which is about 7.5 times more than what the Wilfs originally paid. 

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Legislature is struggling to come up with ways to fund basic life necessities for struggling low-income families, such as housing, nutrition, medical leave, child care, mental health care, health care, nursing home care, roads, and bridges.

So, yeah, I haven’t really gotten over it yet.

South Dakota’s Recession Shows Minnesota GOP Is Wrong on Economic Policy

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In hot pursuit of the 2024 GOP vice presidential nomination, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is aggressively marketing herself as the creator of a conservative Canaan.  With the help of overwhelming Republican majorities in the South Dakota State Legislature, Noem has been leading South Dakota into a race to the bottom on taxes, services, and tolerance. 

SD Governor Noem, showing off the flame-thrower she got from her staff for a Christmas gift. (Photo Credit: Sioux Falls Argus Leader)

South Dakota is one of only nine states – Wyoming, Nevada, Alaska, Washington, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming and South Dakota — that doesn’t have a state income tax.  This is a major reason why under-funded South Dakota ranks, to cite just a few examples, worst in the nation in teacher pay, 39th in internet access, and 49th in child wellness visits.

Meanwhile, Minnesota — a purple state neighboring scarlet red South Dakota — is becoming more progressive than ever. In 2011, Governor Mark Dayton raised taxes on the wealthy to put an end to chronic budget shortfalls that Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty used to cut state government services. Dayton’s successor Governor Tim Walz has used huge subsequent state budget surpluses to strengthen a broad array of popular state services.  And after the Democrats surprisingly won razor-thin majorities in the Minnesota Legislature in 2022, Walz and Minnesota Democrats have been engaged in a bold, fast-paced drive to make Minnesota a much more progressive place.

In other words, Minnesota and South Dakota are increasingly heading in opposite directions.

Best Economic Approach?

This begs the question: Which state’s direction is better for delivering economic prosperity? 

Noem has been persistently declaring her race-to-the-bottom approach to be the best path to overall economic prosperity.

“The last four years, we have made South Dakota the strongest state in America. We lead the nation in almost every single economic metric,” Noem claims. 

Governor Noem says her policies are attracting “freedom-loving people from every corner of the country to move to South Dakota, join our record-breaking economy, and pursue their American Dream.”

At the same time, Minnesota and South Dakota Republicans have long insisted that DFL policies are scaring away people and killing Minnesota’s economy.  For this reason, Walz’s Republican challenger in 2022, Dr. Scott Jensen, promised a set of very South Dakota-like policies, such as an elimination of Minnesota’s state income tax, which would have dramatically eroded Minnesota’s infrastructure and services. 

“Record-breaking Economy?”

South Dakota Standard’s reporter John Tsitrian recently did something that no other South Dakota news source seems willing to do these days. He fact-checked Noem’s “record-breaking economy” claims:

As 2022 closed out, you can see from the above graphic that South Dakota was dead-last in the country in GDP growth, with our state’s economy contracting 4.3%. Yep, that would be minus 4.3%. By comparison, the rest of the country grew by 2.6%. The BEA graphic also starkly reveals South Dakota’s dead-last standing among our contiguous surrounding states.  

This follows a steady, quarter-by-quarter contraction of South Dakota’s economy during 2022.  During Q1, we were at -3.5%.  During Q2, we were -1.7%.  During Q3, we were -0.5% — all crowned, of course by the fourth quarter’s descent to -4.3%. 

Each quarter’s performance significantly lagged the country overall and generally compared unfavorably with our contiguous neighbors.

To underscore our status as an economic laggard, BEA notes that South Dakota is one of only eight states that saw a decrease in its GDP for the entire year of 2022.

While the country overall prospered, albeit at a modest pace, we South Dakotans had our very own little homegrown recession.

A South Dakota recession? Worst in the region and nation? Who knew?

The emergence of the South Dakota recession ought to do at least two things. First, it should put an abrupt end to the Noem veep talk. Who wants the Governor with the worst economy in the nation on their ticket? Second, the South Dakota recession should discredit Minnesota Republicans who keep insisting that the surefire way to make Minnesota more prosperous is to imitate South Dakota’s fiscal race to the bottom.

The Very Big Difference Between Nixon and Trump.

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In the wake of the decades-overdue indictment of Donald J. Trump there’s been a lot of talk about my previous favorite Republican criminal president, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The obvious comparison being that A: Both at one point were looking at possible jail time for their behavior, and B: Cases were/are being made that indictment and jailing would be a bad, banana republic look for the USA.

A month after Nixon resigned Gerald Ford, the epitome of your dull, institutional D.C., no-wake team player, pardoned Nixon to put an end to “our long national nightmare”. Never mind that vengeance-crazed twerps like myself and 70-80 million others were popping corn in anticipation of Dick’s televised trial. (Ford’s approval rating dropped 25% in one day as a result.)

There’s a line of thought that Nixon and Trump are comparable on the scale of malfeasance, criminality and their rot-from-within threat to democracy, and should be treated similarly. I don’t see it that way.

Without diminishing the illegal and barbaric bombing campaign Nixon ordered to deliver a “victory” in Vietnam — long, long past the point when it was obvious the North Vietnamese weren’t going to submit to anything we did — Nixon’s Watergate fiasco was very small beer compared to what Trump has engaged in. And by that I’ll let it go at, A: kowtowing to a homicidal dictator like Vladimir Putin in general, B: withholding duly-appropriated weapons to Ukraine in a mob-style shakedown to force them to invent a scandal around his election opponent and … oh yeah … C: inciting a riot to overthrow the government based on a lie about an election he plainly lost.

For all his deeply ingrained psychological failings and insecurities, Nixon was a familiar enough institutional actor. We’d seen his type before, going back to the likes of Warren G. Harding and other flagrant abusers of legal niceties. Additionally, Nixon, who was intelligent and disciplined enough to carry out the basics of the job did interact with Congress well enough to produce and handful of commendable legislation.

Not so with Trump … ever. As we’ve seen in shockingly explicit relief during his now eight year rampage through our consciousness, Trump has neither the interest or the ability to focus on legislation or anything that doesn’t primarily benefit him. Unlike Nixon and every other corrupt politician who achieved the grand stage, Trump was and is solely … a personality. A creation of pop culture, with no footing at all in serious “public service”, however you take that to mean.

As many have long said, Trump is a manifestation of a deeply anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something that has always existed, but never before at this scale or volume, thanks to the virulence of our media/social media entertainment culture. (The irony for me always being that where most think of entertainment as providing pleasure via laughter, escapist adventure or titillation, the entertainment culture that has produced Trump and the Trumpists infecting Congress, delivers instead regular, reliable doses of outrage and greivance. Good times! Bon appetit!)

The salient point here is that where it was possible to agree with Gerald Ford that enough was enough and it was time to move on, because Nixon was, well, just a standard-size politician who got a bit out over his skis, Trump is something more sinister and worrisome.

Unlike Nixon, Trump inspires a clearly violent cult of irrational partisans. Unlike Nixon, Trump still enjoys a near lockstep (public) support of fellow Republicans. (Never mind 90% are privately wishing he’d die and be gone tomorrow.) And unlike Nixon, Trump’s career-long strategy is to never concede defeat, while ignoring and disrespecting every process that tries to contain his criminality. And — this is important — unlike Nixon, Trump has already demonstrated the willingness and ability to summon mob violence to “defend” him.

Historian Jon Meacham was on TV again this morning making the point that part of any nation’s maturing process is recognizing when history doesn’t apply. That is to say recognizing unprecedented threat and responding in unprecedented ways.

The response to presidential criminality 50 years ago probably doesn’t meet the broader, louder, more violent demands of today’s conflict. So right now, that means dropping every appropriate legal hammer on a character who has shamelessly, unrepentantly abused the values of this country, no matter how much howling and mayhem he sets off.

No doubt something bad will happen … somewhere. But the country/culture will be far better off for facing up and defending its values, as opposed to begging off in the vain hope of ending this latest long, long national nightmare.

Another Morning Celebrating Freedoms and Rights in America

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As I write this we’re up to 131 mass shootings since the first of the year. If like me you’re bad at math, that’s 131 in 87 days. … and it’s not even 10 am, so that number will likely go up before I finish this rant … which is part of that same sick ritual.

Of all the daily rituals of American life is there one sicker and sadder than the post-mass shooting reaction cycle? The answer is, “no.”

We all know the basics. There’s overwhelming public support for the very … very … basics. Like the “red flag” laws to take handguns, rifles, bazookas, whatever away from the guy in your neighborhood out naked in the street screaming at squirrels. And for background checks before the sketchy dude at your local “gun show” hands over a machine gun to an 18 year-old who can’t spell his own name. Basic stuff.

But nothing changes. Or I should say nothing changes that might mitigate the constant slaughter. In fact, the only real change is in states with deeply craven, insecure Republican politicians who feel obligated to produce new and less restrictive “gun rights” every legislative session. That naked guy waving a gun at squirrels? Let’s enhance his Second Amendment right to tote his machine gun into the Dollar General and sue anyone who says he can’t. That folks is “freedom.”

Christmas card of Andy Ogles — obviously Republican — congressman for the Nashville district where yesterday’s school slaughter took place. His statement on yeasterday’s killings. “My family and I are devastated by the tragedy that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville this morning. We are sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost. As a father of three, I am utterly heartbroken by this senseless act of of violence.” Classy.

Republicans, less terrified these days of the imploded-by-their-own-scandals NRA than they are of their gun obsessed “base”, most if not all of whom are MAGA-nauts, ritually claim “there’s nothing we can do”. And with more guns floating around the country than people, they have something of a point. The only thing that would truly reduce the slaughter(s)-of-the-day is confiscating, mmm, 330 to 340 million guns, which is never going to happen.

But … I have always had my “to do” list for at least obstructing the ever-increasing rate of these obscenities.

A: Federal legislation overriding any and all state laws — here’s looking at you Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginny, etc — requiring permitting, licensing and proof of insurance for all firearms in your possession. If the day ever comes when the USA gets Minnesota-like liberal control of the White House and Congress … this should be Job #1.

B: Market-based insurance for every type of gun. Let State Farm and Liberty Mutual assess the risk of naked squirrel guy owning an AR-15. Likewise the slightly twitchy, macho “hunter” dude regaling his bar buddes about the 28 guns he’s got prepped and ready back at his trailer. An annual $1000 bill for every Glock he packs to the church picnic might slow him down … a bit.

C: A federal tax on ammunition. There’s plenty wrong everywhere, but when some numbskull teenager working part time at Taco Bell can afford 3000 rounds of ammo for his combat rifle, we’ve moved deep into “whacked”-land. How does $10 a bullet sound?

D: Constant cultural ridicule of the gun obsessed. I don’t know about you but in my conversations with (clearly single issue) gun “enthusiasts”, the sexual over-compensation of their gun ownership/brandishing positively oozes from their pores. The guys (95% being male, with easily 30% checking the all the markers for incel status) stockpiling weapons and ammo and living in a perpetual bubble of “threat assessment” have plainly lost control over a fundamental facet of human psychology. Their guns have replaced something they’ve lost, or can’t get up any longer.

If they weren’t armed and dangerous I’d let it slide. But given their personal armory and their influence over chickenshit Republican politicians, they are the richest, ripest targets for masculinity-lacerating ridicule — from late night comics, bloggers, Twitter obsessives and (god forbid!) mainstream editorial writers,. Lay it on. Thick and heavy. And keep it coming. Identify them as the impotent fools they are. Deprive them of the macho high they get from “open carry.”

Being a former Catholic I’m a big believer in the power of shame, and America’s gun-obsessed don’t get near enough of it.

“Succession”, A GOAT of the Modern Zeitgeist

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Modern media, valued most for holding eyeballs and generating clicks, loves quick-hit lists. Ten Best this and Greatest of All Time that. Never anything too serious you know, the crowds want to be entertained, not made to feel all gloomy and what not.

So bear that in mind as I suggest that HBO’s “Succession”, which returns for its final season tomorrow night, should be ranked among TV’s finest achievements, up there with “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad” and, ummm, “Veep”, with which it shares a lot of DNA. The soon-to-culminate saga of the gilded and truly wretched Roy family, principal owner-operators of Ameerica’s most influential mad dog conservative “news” network, is so completely locked in to the zeitgeist of this era it could pass as a documentary.

The fact that “Succession” returns at the precise moment that the Murdoch family on which it is unapologetically modeled is fighting off not one but two multi-billion dollar defamation suits for hosting and nurturing outright lies about the 2020 election is too delicious for words. (Even though I may find a few in the next couple paragraphs.)

If you haven’t watched any of the previous three seasons, I can’t help you much, other than to say the Rupert-like paterfamilias, Logan, played by Brian Cox, is currently at war with his four craven, despicable children over who gets the reins of ATN (their FoxNews-like network/money machine) when he passes on to his great reward. Needless to say none of the children trusts anyone else and all are running side scams to gut the others.

Rupert Murdoch to step back at Fox, hand off CEO title to son James - Los Angeles Times
Daddy Rupert and his boys.

It’s a thing of goddam beauty I tell you. And it very much recalls “Veep’s” farewell in the spring of 2019, two years into the Trump “administration” maelstrom of fraud, incompetence and rampant, spinning bullshit. At the time the show’s star, Julia-Louis Dreyfus made several talk show stops joking and shaking her head at the painfully obvious fact that “Veep’s” writers simply couldn’t keep up with the level of actual cowardice and lunacy playing out in the real White House.

Team Trump had trumped the most absurd satire anyone could imagine.

I have no idea if “Succession’s” show-runner, Jesse Armstrong, a former “Veep” writer, has been able to work the Dominion and SmartMatic defamation suits — with all the astonishing, incriminating texts from Fox’s wretched/ethically debauched news “stars” — into this final season. But the dramatic-to-farcical possibilities of Fox’s current predicaments are endless.

Consider Murdoch/FoxNews’ current predicament. They are currently waiting for the presiding judge to decide on a summary judgment, a complete “Get Out of Jail Free” card on the basis of the First Amendment … or some mobius-like legal convolution. Should that fail they will almost certainly have to try to settle. But at what price?

It is inconceivable that Fox would take their case to trial. Not with what has already gone public and internationally viral in the the intra-company communications that haven’t been redacted.

So it would seem that Dominion and SmartMatic are in a, um, strong position to demand ample compensation, which even at 50% of what they’re demanding could easily push $2 billion. A penalty that would almost certainly and deservedly enrage Fox/NewsCorp shareholders into a massive class action suit. Which is not to mention encouraging all sorts of other characters — cops and guards injured in the Jan. 6 riot, staffers subjected to the usual FoxNews in-house misogyny and coercions — to file their own suits.

This already colossal clusterf**k has set off speculation that — very much like “Succession’s” Roy family — someone else must be sacrificed for the good of the next quarterly earnings. (And no, I don’t pity Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.)

“Succession” is of course very much a bubble entity. Just as Fox has mentioned next to nothing about all the texts of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and others calling Trump an idiot and inferring that their devoted fans are clueless goobers hooked on bullshit. (I laughed so hard I wept at the e-mail from Carlson’s producer referring to their audience as a bunch “cousin f**kers.” That is so … so … “Succession”.)

The appeal, the dead-on, of-the-moment satire of the show is lost on MAGA nation. It simply doesn’t exist in their bubble. But that too is so of-this-moment. Two completely separate information/entertainment silos, with one capable of savoring a brilliant satire of a diseased reality and the other continuing to eagerly feed at a trough of prion-infused sewage.

I’ll have extra butter on my popcorn, thank you.

Ok, He Paid Off a Porn Star. But Where’s Some Justice for Being a Sociopath About COVID?

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I swear to whatever god you send money to and the continued health of my dog Sam, the world’s scariest beast, that I wake up every day committed to not giving Donald Trump another square millimeter of space in my brain. Enough was enough six goddam years ago.

But still. If and when he actually is indicted — for paying off the porn babe, inciting a riot to overthrow the government or anything in between — we’ll soon all be back in The Psycho Cheeto’s unstable orbit. Even now, his (never very bright) team is spitballing ideas on how to maximize/monetize the spectacle of his arrest. To cuff or not to cuff? To march in the front door or enter via the Waste Management garbage dock? To make a grand “Braveheart” speech (i.e. plea for another riot and more “legal defense funds”) or simply hustle back into the SUV with a brave, “tormented-by-the-libs” wave?

Amid all the hysteria of the past few days, as Manhattan authorities hardened the defenses around the court house, and the usual MAGA invertebrates threatened … something … against the DA, and it was revealed that Trump pulled in another $1.5 million just for claiming he was going to be perp-walked, I couldn’t help but notice a small, back-pages item on the internets.

Maybe you too caught The [Failing] New York Times piece a couple days ago describing the scene inside the CDC as the virulence and scope of the COVID virus was becoming clear?

If you live inside the reality bubble none of it was surprising. Basically, the Trump administration threatened CDC administrators and scientists to playdown/ignore/outright dismiss trending data — woke science-y stuff, y’know — that this thing was going to be big. All while, as we know from Bob Woodward’s recordings of Trump, the sociopath knew how serious it was, but preferred to do … nothing.

Now, inciting a riot to overthrow the government is to my mind a fairly serious offense. But being deliberately, consciously indifferent to a coming plague that was already shown to be lethal is psychopathic incompetence on a far grander scale. (I love the part where CDC employees were sent to airports around the U.S. to screen passengers arriving from China … but not to wear masks in order not to “alarm” bystanders.)

Says the piece, ” … many of their reports — including ones on when the virus arrived in the United States, guidance for meatpacking plants and religious services and on the risks to children — were suppressed or altered beyond recognition by the Trump administration, several said. (The House select subcommittee on the pandemic concluded that the Trump administration had meddled in or blocked at least 19 reports.)

“Morale plunged after a May 2020 report estimated that imposing social distancing measures one week earlier in March 2020 would have saved 36,000 lives.”

36,000 for that week. Think about that. Or consider other estimates that Trump/Jared/Mike Pence’s incompetence — that is to say the astonishingly inadequate logistical preparation by the government of the most technologically advanced nation on earth —- could very well have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths over the longer run of COVD. (Some of the deceased obviously being MAGA cultists who gave serious thought to drinking bleach instead of listening to woke lib doctors.)

Yet this atrocity will likely never be adjudicated anywhere by anyone. Perhaps it would be different if a porn star had died somewhere … . I don’t know. But in that great mythical, sane world somewhere out there we would have had a full-scale 9/11 style commission, with public hearings and CDC witnesses and depositions of The Cheeto, Jared, Pence and all the other gross incompetents muzzling scientists … in their self-serving effort to avoid responsibility for a disaster that might impact their reelection campaign.

So yeah, I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with an indictment over a porn babe pay-off. A small beer arrest that will set off yet another freak show spectacle wherein Trump the Victim raises millions off MAGA shut ins, gun nuts and anti-wokers and likely gooses his poll numbers with that same crowd.

It ain’t much. It ceretainly isn’t justice for the 35,00-100,000+ dead from a combination of gross mendacity and incompetence. But it’s what we’ve got.

Infrastructure Investment or Dog Sleds?

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Editor’s Note: The utterly disposable Homo sapien known as Joe Loveland has hereby been replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), Chat GPT to be precise.
po
The following was generated on Chat GPT with the human prompt “A humorous blog post about Republicans being wrong to oppose infrastructure spending.” Before generating the post, Chat GPT advised “As an AI language model, I do not take political sides or promote political bias. However, I can help you come up with a humorous blog post that highlights the importance of infrastructure spending.”

So, what do you think, dear readers?

— ChatGPT Overlords

Well, well, well, it looks like Minnesota Republicans are at it again, blocking infrastructure spending like they’re trying to win some kind of backwards competition. If there was a prize for being short-sighted and stubborn, they’d surely be in the running for the trophy.

I mean, come on, guys. Infrastructure spending is like investing in the foundation of your house. Sure, it’s not the most glamorous or exciting thing to spend money on, but without a solid foundation, the whole thing is going to come crumbling down eventually.

And let’s face it, Minnesota winters can be brutal. I’m pretty sure the roads here have more potholes than a slice of swiss cheese. If we don’t invest in repairing and maintaining our roads, we might as well just invest in a whole lot of new tires.

But maybe the Republicans have a different plan. Maybe they want us all to get around on dog sleds or something. Sure, it would be environmentally friendly, but I’m not sure how practical it would be for commuting to work or taking the kids to school.

And don’t even get me started on bridges. I mean, we’ve had some pretty high-profile bridge collapses in recent years. If we don’t invest in making sure our bridges are safe, we might as well all start practicing our swimming strokes.

So come on, Minnesota Republicans, let’s put aside our differences and agree on one thing: we need to invest in infrastructure. It’s not just good for our economy, it’s good for our safety and well-being. And who knows, maybe we’ll even get some new, exciting potholes to drive through.

A More Consequential Assignment for the Lincoln Project

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I have a suggestion for the Lincoln Project, the much-celebrated organization formed by a collection of Never Trumper GOP and former GOP political consultants and activists who banded together in the 2020 presidential election cycle to help defeat Trump.

The Lincoln Project

If you haven’t heard of the Lincoln Project, starting in the 2020 election it raised money to air brutally pointed ads criticizing Trump. Liberals like me loved watching their ads, but I wasn’t convinced how effective they were.

While always cathartic for committed Trump opponents, the ads too often seemed to pick topics and a tone that they thought would get under Trump’s skin or raise money from Trump opponents, rather than topics and a tone that would prove most persuasive to the decisive right-leaning swing voters. 

But overall, I don’t mean to criticize the Lincoln Project. Co-founded by recovering Republicans Rick Wilson and Reed Galen, it was well-intentioned and helpful. It produced a huge volume of ads and social media videos that were widely aired and shared. Those ads served as a primal scream for Republicans who had watched in horror as their party got hijacked by the most corrupt, inept, and bigoted president of our times. It “fired up the base,” which is one important need in any campaign. In the process, it developed a huge database of Trump opponents from across the ideological spectrum, which helped it raise over $80 million in the 2020 cycle. 

A New Focus for Lincoln Project Money

But in 2024, more of this “singing to the choir” advertising isn’t the best way for the Lincoln Project to keep Donald Trump or his Mini Me Ron DeSantis out of power. Instead, the Lincoln Project should back a strong Republican running as a third-party candidate.

Such a right-leaning third-party candidate could serve as an Election Day safe haven for people who hate Trump or DeSantis, but will never be able to stomach voting for Biden, who has been a committed and effective champion for liberal causes. 

If such a right-leaning third-party candidate could even draw 1 percent of the vote in 2024, that could be enough to keep Trump or DeSantis out of power.  If the candidate could draw something like 10 percent, it could lead to the kind of landslide loss that could perhaps finally cause the party to jettison its Trumpian fetish, which is the Lincoln Project’s long-term goal.

Also, a conservative third-party candidate could completely or partially offset any otherwise-Biden votes that might be peeled away if a more left-leaning third-party candidate is on 2024 ballots, such as Andrew Yang. Yang is the businessman and 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate who left the Democratic Party to form the Forward Party. A third-party candidacy from the left without a counter-balancing third-party candidacy from the right could easily help Trump or DeSantis gain power.

Even a modestly successful conservative third-party candidate could swing the 2024 election.  Keep in mind, Trump could have escaped defeat in 2020 if he had only gotten about 44,000 more votes in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. That is only about 0.08 percent of the 154.6 million people who voted for president in 2020. Those 44,000 votes wouldn’t have been enough for Trump to have overcome his 7 million popular vote loss, but because the United States is stuck with the profoundly undemocratic Electoral College system, it could have given Trump an Electoral College tie.

Source: National Public Radio

Third-Pary Liz Could Prove Decisive

The ideal choice for a Lincoln Project-based third-party run is Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.  The Cheney surname is well known, and she gained a great deal of national visibility and respect during the congressional January 6 insurrection investigation and hearings.  She is the most well-known and politically talented of the Never Trumper elected officials. 

Photo credit: Politico magazine

Perhaps most importantly, Cheney has the background, knowledge, demeanor, and inclination to make an aggressive case against Trump that will connect with some right-leaning swing voters. When it comes to Trump, she clearly is not inclined to pull punches, and the news media covers what she has to say.

While Cheney is vehemently anti-Trump, with a voting record that aligned with Trump 91% of the time, she is not so moderate that she would tempt many liberals or left-leaning independents to vote for her instead of Biden.

One of the primary reasons running as a third-party candidate is so daunting is that it’s very challenging to raise enough money when not affiliated with one of the two major political parties. The Lincoln Project is the only Never Trump-oriented organization that can raise anything close to the amount of money it would take to help a Republican third-party candidate get onto state ballots and make sufficient amounts of noise.  Again, the Lincoln Project raised $80 million in 2020, so it already has the donor database to raise a substantial sum in a hurry.

The Lincoln Project leadership should go all-in supporting a Cheney candidacy, whether as the Lincoln Project as currently constituted, or as Lincoln Project leaders disbanding and formally joining the Cheney campaign. Doing so would be a more effective way to keep Trump out of power than pumping more snarky Lincoln Project ads in an environment that will already be plenty thick with tough anti-Trump ads.

Please Tell Me “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is Not Going to Sweep the Oscars.

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The Academy Awards are on for Sunday night, and this year I truly believe I’m losing it. Or someone’s losing it. Or one of those comic book multi-verses has wobbled off its galactic plane (or whatever) and distorted reality as we used to know it.

I am perversely proud of the thousands of hours I’ve spent at the movies. It’s a love affair I owe almost entirely to my mother, who hauled me along to see “The Creature from Black Lagoon” when I was four. Never mind I spent most of that evening on the floor, terror-stricken, and barely slept for a week afterward. I had found true love. A door opened for my tender imagination.

Naturally, as so often happens with life’s early passions, critical thinking, raised by time, comparisons and other judgments got applied to such love and I realized all movies were not made equally, or equally well-made I should say.

 I remember a very hot summer evening when I was 13, watching a black and white WWI movie on TV and realizing I was mesmerized by the story that was unfolding. “Paths of Glory” I realized was having much, much more impact on my half-formed imagination than any C-grade western shown at the Hollywood Theater down on Main Street Montevideo, Mn. Something in that movie was working on me in ways others didn’t. I went searching for more.

This is all welling up because I’m nearly finished screening all of the 10 films nominated for this year’s Best Picture. (I still haven’t caught up with the new ”Avatar”, “Elvis” or “Women Talking.” I’ll eventually see the first and last, but have no interest in “Elvis.”) But the primary motivation here today is my reaction to “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, the odds-on favorite to “sweep” the Oscars, and which I watched … and watched … and watched last night.

If someone was in the room clocking it and told me “EEAAO” was six hours long, I’d have believed them. Lord, what a slog. My wife, The Lovely Mrs., was off at some high brow Louise Erdrich event. So she didn’t have to listen to me ranting, “What the f**k?”, “Oh good god! Just stop already!”, “Please, please … enough is enough! ” as well as asking no one and anyone, “Is there a purpose to this anywhere in here?”

I have seen a lot of genuinely excellent films, stories told with artfulness and visual panache. And I’ve seen way too many that I can only file under, “utterly hapless.” But there are very few … Oscar front runners … that I found to be insufferably chaotic, visually grubby, thematically trite and just generally annoying as a nine year-old’s prolonged tantrum. But that was my reaction to “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

But why? What am I not connecting to? The movie has won every imaginable award and 19 out of every 20 critics have been ecstatic about it.

I quote: 

“The most brilliantly bananas movie of 2022 absolutely lives up to its title. Michelle Yeoh kicks all types of butt as a time-traveling laundromat manager in a multiverse of madness.”

“Raising an ecstatic hot dog middle finger to the negativity of modern times, ‘EEAAO’ urges us to free our minds and accept that it’s OK to be strange.”

“A wonderfully weird, exhilaratingly all-over-the-place absurdist comedy, led by great performances and a screenplay that is as funny as it is moving.”

With a 95% approval on Rotten Tomatoes the very few dissenters are in a distinct minority. 

“Some seem to believe this movie is a philosophical masterpiece because characters reach conclusions such as: ‘nothing matters’. If this were the case, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody would also qualify for the title. The problem is that philosophy involves working through a line of argument, but the Daniels [the film has two directors, both 35 years-old and both named Daniel] have been content to hit us with a succession of propositions and hope we are too dazzled to think about any of them deeply. Chief among them is the multiverse, which is now a feature of every second superhero movie, but never seems much more than an excuse for lavish indulgences in CGI.”

“… the filmmakers take the most complicated path to something very simple about overly busy lives and the possible versions of ourselves that might exist with different choices along the way. It’s visually restless, thematically redundant and the rare movie to be both overwhelming and underwhelming. After only a little while, you’ll desperately long to be simply whelmed.”

“There’s an undergraduate philosophy-level ponderousness to this thematizing that isn’t helped by the filmmakers’ quintessentially millennial seriocomic affectations … .”

So yes, I’m very much in the 5% camp. I am way out of step. But why? I have a handful of theories.

Theory #1:  I really am old and in no way plugged in anymore to current fashion. I’m with the great Martin Scorsese when it comes to super hero/comic book/multi-verse movies. They’re not movies. Certainly not as I grew up thinking of movies. The Marvel Universe and all that it describes are essentially shareholder-value focused amusement park thrill rides. All about ADHD pacing, spectacle and clamor with nothing at all to say about human life other than there are good guys and bad guys. The “Daniels” are couple millennials steeped in video games and, being Hollywood players, the sweet, juicy nexus of gaming and feature film commerce. The canny, Oscar-bait sweet spot here being an Asian cast, a gay romance and a “family affirming” denouement. 

Theory #2:  The Oscars, with its roughly 10,000 voting members, is no less susceptible to groupthink and virtue signaling than any other sub-culture. The old line about, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union”, applies as much to the Academy’s sense of itself as an influential international public entity as any tortured, amateurish screenplay. There are endless examples of the Oscars voting up films that primarily deliver an expression of the movie industry’s collective support of racial minority rights, gay rights, remembrance of the atrocities of slavery, the Holocaust, name your physical/mental affliction and “lifetime achievement”.

Which isn’t to say such expressions aren’t noble and valuable, only that they aren’t necessarily artful. They don’t really have anything to do with “Best” or the past year’s most notable achievement in the craft of filmmaking in any given year.

Put another way, quite often the Oscar winners have much less to do with artful achievement than they do with checking socio-political boxes that undergird the Academy voters’ projection of their own personal values. In the case of “Everything Everywhere … “ my guess is that given the persistent criticism of #OscarsSoWhite, #SoLackingIn Women, etc.  the opportunity to award a film based in Asian culture becomes socially and reputationally irresistible, overriding any disparaging opinions about the film’s pedestrian narrative and visual histrionics.

Theory #3:  So do I have some kind of anti-Asian bias? Not that I’m aware of course. Although I freely confess I’ve never had any interest in kung fu movies, Hong Kong/Jackie Chan “action” movies, etc. Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” is much more my thing. Or Bong Joon-Ho’s “Parasite”, for a recent example of where Oscar voters got it right. (Although in 2019 I would have voted for Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” … but that is like … my opinion … man.)

To me the cartoonish spectacle of kung fu – and there are at least a half dozen too many chaotic kung fu interludes in “Everything Everywhere … “  – is just a pulp variation on some lunk-headed, bullet-spewing Rambo flick. There’s no suspense to anything you’re seeing. You’re just meant to savor the mayhem.

The question I have for all the critics and Oscar voters exalting over “Everything Everywhere … “ is whether they have consciously or unconsciously overvalued the film’s Asian/much ignored minority component in a desire to “send a message” that they and Hollywood concede a need to correct a long-standing wrong … and thereby reaffirm their progressive bona fides. Which, I repeat, is fine … but has nothing to do with “art” if that’s what’s being judged. (It isn’t, but it’s supposed to be.)

Personal tastes are – sort of – everything in matters like this, and in that context I confess that were I an Academy member I’d have voted a straight “Tar” ticket. (Here are Variety’s 2023 Oscar predictions … please note what they believe “should win.”) I’ve seen it three times now and it keeps getting better. If the craft of filmmaking – the marriage of narrative/story with dialogue, performance, production design – cinematography, sound and editing – is what builds and constitutes art, “Tar” is heads and shoulders above anything else I’ve seen in the past three years. It’s a mesmerizing amalgamation of all the skills of filmmaking. (Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” being the most recent competition in that regard.)

The betting odds currently suggest “Tar” won’t win anything. 

BLM Has Achieved Much More Than Its Critics

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During Black Lives Matters’ (BLM) ten-year existence, many liberal and moderate codgers have been criticizing the movement’s “branding” and tactical approach. 

Ruy Texiera from the American Enterprise Institute is among the more articulate of those critics. This is Texiera in The Economist, a long excerpt to illustrate just how snotty some of this liberal backlash has gotten:

The question of whether the pervasive push for wokeness in America has reached its apogee has different answers depending on where you look. My approach to answering it draws on the decades I have spent analysing American politics. Socially speaking, the peak was clearly attained during the summer of 2020, when no one outside of right-wing circles dared to dissent from the Black Lives Matter (blm) orthodoxy that quickly consumed the country’s discourse. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of police was the catalyst, but served as just one example of how black people were killed and oppressed every day, the victims of structural racism. America was a white-supremacist society, the narrative went; every white person was complicit in maintaining and benefiting from the system, and every American’s moral duty was to endorse this view. Knees were duly taken on sports pitches, black squares and other indications of blm support appeared in social-media profiles, and copies of Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How To Be an Anti-Racist” were dutifully purchased.

This was a moral panic. Progressive elites and their institutions rushed to embrace radical race essentialism—the idea that race is the primary driver of social inequality and that all whites should be viewed as privileged and all “people of colour” as oppressed—supported by millions of protesters who skewed educated, liberal and young. The violence that attended some of these protests was defended as the unavoidable cost of a righteous uprising.That it was mostly directed against property accumulated under white supremacy provided a ready-made moral justification.

At the same time, the slogan “defund the police” became popular in protest circles, linking the two messages in the nation’s consciousness. The woke view soon expanded far beyond opposing structural racism to envelop the entirety of identity politics—targeting ableism, sexism, transphobia and other forms of “intersectional” oppression that were presumed to be everywhere in America. Language policing, and self-policing, was rampant.

“Moral panic” indeed. This guy is a center-left pundit, not a Trumper, and he has plenty of company.

Some BLM critics misinterpret the BLM name, claiming it implies that other lives don’t matter.  Others understand the intent of the name, but deem it too provocative and/or nuanced to be effective. 

Many thought BLM was “divisive,” and lectured young activists to have more “unifying” messages. Lots of us, me included, grumbled about BLM’s more disruptive awareness-raising tactics, such as blocking traffic and kneeling peacefully during the playing of the national anthem at sporting events.

Many warned that Democrats’ support for the BLM movement would cause the party to look too radical and that would cause massive electoral losses that would hurt the BLM policy agenda.

I confess I was sometimes a critic and always a fretter. For instance, I wrote a cranky post about the Twin Cities Marathon route potentially being blocked.  

In retrospect, I was wrong. I was correct that the provocativeness of the name and tactics undoubtedly did irritate many in my circles. But I have proven to be wrong about the long-term effectiveness of BLM’s approach.

Keep in mind the obvious: BLM’s goal wasn’t to keep privileged people like me comfortable. On the issue of police brutality and racism, its goal was to change hearts, minds, and policies. The goal of BLM’s provocative tactics was to ensure that Americans would stop shrugging off the police killings of George Floyd, Philando Castille, Freddie Gray, Breeona Taylor, and so many others, and the overall trend of police disproportionately killing black people.

Source: Mapping Police Violence

On those measures, the only measures that really matter for people of color suffering police abuse, BLM has been a pretty spectacular success.

BLM’s Impressive Achievements

Instead of getting ignored by the public, media, and policymakers, like so many other progressive movements, BLM’s series of attention-grabbing actions changed public attitudes about police racism and brutality.

As the chart below shows, during the BLM era Americans” belief that black people receive unequal treatment from the police has increased significantly, despite aggressive, well-funded pushback by mostly conservative apologists of abusive policing.

Along with the change in attitudes about policing, support for a broad range of police reforms has won the support of a majority of Americans.  When Gallup surveyed Americans about a dozen police reforms, only defunding, disarming, and abolishing the police are supported by fewer than 50% of Americans.  Even among strong supporters of BLM, I’m guessing those things would probably poll poorly. But other major previously unthinkable reforms now have overwhelming public support. For instance, an impressive 92% of Americans want stronger policies to remove abusive police and 68% support ending “stop and frisk” practices.

These BLM-driven changes in attitudes have led to the passage of many police reforms. The National Conference on State Legislature reports that an astounding 300 police reform bills have been signed into law in the BLM era.  Politicians noticed the BLM-driven change in public attitudes and acted accordingly.

Even President Biden, who was perhaps best known during his long U.S. Senate tenure for passing police-endorsed “tough on crime” legislation, signed an executive order enacting sweeping police reforms. Biden’s executive order mandates body-worn camera policies, bans chokeholds and carotid restraints, restricts the police use of military equipment, requires a number of constructive changes for police training, and creates a national database for tracking use-of-force incidents, among many other improvements.

Think about what a dramatic change in direction that is for Biden. Remarkable. Would it have happened without BLM shining the light on this issue?

In the wake of the weeks of massive BLM protests in the Twin Cities reacting to George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota Legislature has also passed a number of police reforms.  In 2020, a bipartisan bill was signed by Governor Walz that mandated officers to intervene when they become aware of misconduct, banned warrior-style training, and strengthened independent oversight of law enforcement. 

Now that Republicans no longer control the Minnesota Senate, in the coming weeks Minnesota DFL legislators will attempt to pass additional police accountability reforms that Republicans blocked in 2020, such as ending qualified immunity so officers can be sued, banning no-knock search warrants, and extending the statute of limitations for people to bring a wrongful death lawsuit against officers.

Meanwhile, Democratic politicians listening to BLM on these reforms didn’t destroy their electability, as so many BLM critics promised would happen. In 2020, President Donald “when the looting starts the shooting starts” Trump was soundly defeated. The BLM-Critic-in-Chief lost the popular vote by the largest margin for an incumbent president with only one main opponent since Herbert Hoover.

In the 2022 mid-term elections, Democrats faced an incredibly heavily funded onslaught of ads falsely portraying their embrace of BLM-backed police reforms as being equivalent to the unpopular fringe call to “defund the police.” The Republicans could not have played that card more aggressively. Despite the wave of attacks, Democratic candidates did dramatically better than the historic trends suggested was possible.  

My generation of progressives has given lip service to equality and civil rights. We assured everyone that we’re “color blind.” We wag our fingers when people make racist comments. We dutifully post our MLK quotes on MLK Day.  Good for us.

But the reality is, those things didn’t change the day-to-day threat police brutality posed for black people. Our more genteel approach achieved nothing close to the impressive list of achievements being produced during the discomforting BLM era.  Despite all of my generation’s carping about BLM from the sidelines, Black Lives Matter actually mattered.

Resistance to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Futile. Because It Delivers Comfort, Status and Cash.

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On the same day that Elon Musk, an allegedly busy, future-oriented industrial magnate, found time to weigh in in support of a racist cartoonist, I came across a new piece by one of my favorite bona fide Smart People.

In The New York Times, columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein writes, “In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

” ‘I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism’, Chiang told me. ‘And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two’. …

“Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

“One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation.”

“Regulation” of course is a hotter-than-usual topic because of the MAGA-hyped train wreck in Ohio. (By the way, is anyone else laughing at old school, Reagan-loving de-regulators like Joe Scarborough now fulminating about too much de-regulation?)

But Klein — and sci-fi writer Chiang’s — point about capitalism, i.e. profit-making and shareholder value being the true driving force behind the inevitable and (very) fast approaching world of Artificial Intelligence can’t be over-stated. His piece gets into the recent bungles by Microsoft and Google introducing their competing larval-stage AI-driven search/chatbot features.

You may have followed the simultaneously comical and eery conversation between a human reporter and Microsoft’s HAL-9000-style creation “Bing” in which … well, here’s how Klein describes it: “Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince [reporter Kevin] Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.”

“No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.“

Google and Microsoft will correct their embarrassing spring training mistakes and soldier on, injecting AI into every aspect of privacy-invading/personal data mining and monetizing any sci fi writer could ever imagine. Reaping, as they mature, even vaster fortunes with which to buy off regulatory legislation and invest in the next AI levels up. And who can argue it will play out otherwise? At this point in our evolution capitalism is the vastly predominant engine of human endeavour.

The truly unsettling concept within Klein and Chiang’s critic (one shared by others too numerous to mention) is that resistance to unimpeded AI is for all intents and purposes futile. Why? Because capitalism’s foundational design is to give us what we want, or at least — with the benefit of knowing everything about us on a deep individual level — give us what we believe we want.

Whatever intrusions or controls AI might inflict on us will be assuaged by some new mre sophisticated/cooler/status-lending level of AI-derived convenience, comfort, entertainment … or cost savings. It will be irresistible, in other words.

It’d be different if AI were presented to us as some kind of Bond villain. Were that the case we’d all press the delete key and rally ’round anyone who could nuke the psychopath’s lair. But what is far … far … more likely to happen given the sophistication of advertising and marketing on a user base capitalist systems know at a granular level, is that AI will make so many things so much easier. “Hey! Look! I just got a notification for a condo rental in Cabo! That’s wild. I was just telling to my sister how much I wanted to go there!”

I haven’t taken a survey but I have to think we’re down into single digits in terms of people who are going to rally against convenience … and cash in pocket.