The Georgia legislature is about to give itself the power to override voters and remove county prosecutors from office for, um, reasons. The New York Times:

Two of the measures under consideration would create a new state oversight board that could punish or remove prosecutors for loosely defined reasons, including “willful misconduct.” A third would sharply reduce the number of signatures required to seek a recall of a district attorney.  …

…In the Republican-controlled legislature, as of Friday afternoon, the prospects seemed favorable for the bills creating an oversight committee. They were dimmer for the recall election bill, which would lower the number of registered voters required to sign a petition to prompt a recall of prosecutors from the current 30 percent, which is standard for local elected offices, to just 2 percent. The measure was introduced after some high-profile Trump supporters in Georgia promoted the idea of a recall campaign against Ms. Willis, even though such an effort would be unlikely to succeed in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold.

Of course this is all about shutting down Fani Willis. We don’t know how close she is to indictments. If this measure is signed into law, which is expected to happen in a week or two, I wonder if she’ll speed things up.

One of the guests on MSNBC last night mentioned that Georgia law already allows for the removal of corrupt prosecutors, although I couldn’t find anything more about that on the Web. But all over the country there are Republican legislatures moving to take over county and city departments and offices currently run by Democrats, often elected Democrats.

But this isn’t new. Back in 2011 I wrote about “Martial Law in Michigan.” Then Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican-controlled legislature were passing laws that allowed them to cancel city governments and appoint “emergency” city managers with dictatorial powers. The cities so canceled tended to be places that had lost their industrial base, usually some auto manufacturing plants, and were struggling with much reduced tax revenue. And they also tended to have large Black populations that voted for Democrats. But the emergency managers often had no experience with running cities; they were cost-cutters. They swooped in and cut services, sold public parks to private companies, and famously destroyed the Flint water supply.

Here in Missouri the legislature just voted to put the St. Louis police department under the control of a state board rather than the mayor of St. Louis. The mayor of St. Louis, you might remember, is a Democratic Black woman, Tishaura Jones.

St. Louis has a big problem with violent crime. But a big reason for that is the state’s asinine gun laws. St. Louis desperately needs tougher gun control laws to get the gun violence under control, but the state won’t let the city toughen its own laws. Instead their solution is to put the city police department under control of a panel appointed by the state’s wingnut governor. The St. Louis police union is fine with this, of course. You might remember the St. Louis police department has some issues. Like this.

The state is also making another attempt to remove St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, also a Black woman. The first time they were trying to protect Mark and Patricia McCloskey. That didn’t go anywhere. But recently there was a terrible incident in which a young woman lost her legs in an auto accident. The driver who caused the accident was under felony indictment for a 2020 robbery but was out on bond. And the driver’s case does reveal some sloppy work by the prosecutor’s office; he had violated bond multiple times yet somehow was still out, fallen through the cracks. So it’s going to be harder to protect Gardner this time. The governor plans to appoint someone to replace Gardner and won’t say if he will allow a special election to allow the people to choose their own prosecutor. I’m guessing not.

Back to the New York Times:

The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in prosecutors whom they consider too liberal, and who in some cases are refusing to prosecute low-level drug crimes or enforce strict new anti-abortion laws.

Republicans these days hate democracy. They hate voters. They want fascism.

While the recent CPAC convention was going on, never-Trump Republicans were having a smaller meeting nearby. The mood was bleak.

The former Bush speechwriter turned columnist David Frum compared their effort to reform the party to blazing a landing strip in the middle of the jungle and simply waiting for planes to land. Former congressional candidate Clint Smith, who switched his party affiliation from Republican to Independent to challenge Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), described his state’s GOP as a forest of trees killed by an invasive species of beetle that crawls under bark to poison from the inside. Panels for the event included “Looking to 2024: Hope and Despair — but Mostly Despair” and “Can the GOP survive?”

If it all felt a bit dark at times, it was a reflection of the mood of some headliners.

“Trump is a cancer that’s now metastasized,” said former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), shortly after wrapping the latter panel. “So it’s going to kill the party more.”

Just to illustrate what we’re up against, Tucker Carlson (predictably) just released cherry-picked surveillance footage of the January 6 violence to argue that this was a peaceful protest. And just as predictably, the Right has bought it. The right-wing web sites today have all declared that Tucker has “debunked” the “myth” that the January 6 insurrection was violent. Just like good Nazis, they believe what they’re told to believe.

So, yes, we’re in big trouble here.

MSNBC has been running a four-part series on Rudy Giuliani, “When Truth Isn’t Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story.”  There is one more episode to go. It’s been pretty good, although it hasn’t shown me anything new. However, I had forgotten that Rudy Giuliani was, briefly, the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. This was in 2007, before the primaries had started. By December 2007, he was fading.

There were a number of reasons for the fade. News stories had come out about misappropriations of funds while he was mayor, for example. There were a lot of criticisms of his primary calendar stragtegy. He seemed disinteresed in rural areas far from NYC, for example. But a larger reason, the series said, may have been that he didn’t have anything to run on other than September 11. His past positions on the culture issues, especially abortion and gay rights, was way to the left of the party, so he couldn’t go that route. Instead he went to one campaign event after another talking about Islamic terrorism and how he had handled the September 11 attacks. He was like a one-hit wonder whose hit was now an oldie. He was stuck in the past.

Trump seems to me to be falling into a similar hole. His current campaign seems largely to be based on his 2016 campaign, as the outsider who is promising to go to Washington and bust up the old, corrupt regime. It’s as if he wants us to forget he was POTUS for four years already. But at the same time, he also is running on getting revenge for 2020.

The big polling companies don’t seem to be polling on the alleged fraud in the 2020 election any more. The most recent poll I could find was from last July. But that poll and those that went before pretty consistently showed that just under a third of respondents believed the Big Lie, and close to two thirds did not. Add to that the fact that election deniers overall flamed out in the 2022 midterms, I’d say this is not a viable issue for the 2024 presidential race.

As in 2020, Trump is making promises he doesn’t know how to keep (“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”). Now he’s promising to end the war in Ukraine. Anyone who cares what happens in Ukraine surely would not trust Trump with any part of it. Those who trust Trump probably don’t give a hoo-haw about Ukraine, one way or another.

I admit I didn’t believe Trump could win in 2016 until election night. But subsequent analysis of voters showed us he got the “what the hell” vote, people who really weren’t supporters of either candidate and made up their minds at the last minute. That’s much less likely to happen in 2024. People know him now.

And then there’s Ron DeSantis. DeSantis was in California this weekend running against covid restrictions. I don’t know how Californians overall feel about covid restrictions, but now that they’re all lifted, exactly what point is Ron making here, other than he’s willing to sacrifice lives for the sake of the economy? Florida has a much higher death rate (402 per 100,000 people) from covid than California (255 per 100,000 people). Someone who could do math could probably calculate the number of Floridians who died who wouldn’t have died had they lived in California.

DeSantis seems to be running on gender issues more than Trump, although Trump is running against drag queens and trans women in sports too. I’m not seeing much in the way of recent polling on gender issues. What percentage of Americans are likely to cast votes based on candidates’ positions on drag queens, I wonder? I have no idea. But I doubt the drag queen issue will have the same traction next year as, say abortion.

I’ve already said DeSantis has peaked already. I could be wrong about that. But I’m not seeing anything about his campaign that would appeal to normal people. He and Trump are both competing for the same voting block, seems to me, but that voting block isn’t big enough to carry a national election, I don’t believe, barring some real meltdown by the Democrats.

Where is the Right going now? I liked this description of the recent CPAC convention by Ben Jacobs at New York:

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was once a marquee event on the political calendar where Republicans seeking the favor of the party’s conservative base would attempt to woo a crowd of right-wing activists and diehards. In 2015, the last time there was a competitive Republican presidential primary, a dozen candidates showed up, representing all wings of the party from Chris Christie to Ted Cruz. And they weren’t the only ones there, it was a marquee event for the entire right-wing ecosystem with seemingly every group represented. Eight years later, the vibe was entirely different. The 2023 CPAC felt like a mall after all but one of its big department stores has shut down — an emptier, jankier, lower-rent version of conferences past. The rooms were more deserted, the vendors more downmarket, and speakers a little less important.

On the other hand, Molly Jong-Fast writes at Vanity Fair that Trump and his tribe are still dangerous. She says the vibe at CPAC was more authoritarian than in the past. “Rather than ‘Make America Great Again,’ the vibe, at times, was more like ‘Let’s Make America Hungary.'” And Trump is now explicitly running against the Republican party. “We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open-border zealots and fools,” he said. “But we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”

I don’t think this “movement” has anywhere else to go but into terrorism and violence.

That said, this is just for fun.

This is the last day of CPAC. They go by so fast. And so often. CPAC is supposed to be annual but it feels as if they have one every other month.

CPAC’s chairman, Matt Schalpp, has been accused of grabbing the crotch of a male Herschel Walker staffer, which may be why there are empty seats at the current event. It’s being held just outside Washington, DC, I understand, so filling the seats shouldn’t be that hard. See The Sad, Desolate Scenes of CPAC 2023 at The New Republic.

On Friday, Donald Trump Jr. attempted a “Willy Wonka” moment by telling people there were candy bars with golden tickets under some seats. They were VIP tickets to his father’s reception today. After people checked under their own seats they checked under the empty seats around them. Apparently the stunt didn’t elevate the prevailing sour mood.

Nick Fuentes was removed from the convention yesterday.

“We removed Nick Fuentes from his attempt to attend our conference. His hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with the mission of CPAC,” Matt Schlapp said in a statement posted on Instagram.

I don’t know why they bothered. They aren’t fooling anybody but themselves. After Fuentes was kicked out his supporters hung out outside the convention center and heckled the attendees.

Outside the event, based on videos he posted on Telegram, Fuentes’ supporters walked the streets around the venue and hurled bigoted vitriol at prominent CPAC attendees.

“You work for Jews! What’s wrong with you,” they shouted at one man.

“You’re on a gay date!” they yelled at another.

Oh, and Nikki Haley was heckled by Trump supporters.

Usually anyone thinking of running for POTUS as a Republican would be at CPAC. ABC reports,

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who are seen as possible 2024 hopefuls, are among those staying away — with some opting instead to attend a donor retreat hosted by the anti-tax Club for Growth.

“Ten years ago, [CPAC] was an opportunity to test your messages to conservative leaders and influencers all over the country and to have a big audience get to know you from the podium. And I don’t think that’s where it is today,” said one aide to a possible 2024 candidate. “Last time I was there, it almost felt more like a college crowd than it did a serious thinker crowd.”

Possibly the biggest headlines of the convention were made by Steve Bannon, who declared war on Fox News.

Nobody likes Fox News right now. Unfortunately, Fox’s ratings are doing just fine. At the same time, there are reports Trump is now “shadowbanned” at Fox News. Matt Stieb writes at New York,

According to four Trump aides who spoke with Semafor, the former president is now facing an unofficial ban at Fox News, with the network refusing to book him or even talk much about him in the context of the Republican presidential primary. “It’s certainly — however you want to say, quiet ban, soft ban, whatever it is — indicative of how the Murdochs feel about Trump in this particular moment,” said one aide. Another said they’ve heard directly from people at Fox News that the policy exists.

While the network did not respond to a request for comment, the approach is playing out on television: Trump hasn’t been on Fox News since September, when its hosts rallied around him in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid and he told Sean Hannity that he could declassify documents by “thinking about it.” They even skipped his trip last week to East Palestine, Ohio — a major talking point in the debate over the environmental disaster. Meanwhile, future 2024 also-ran Vivek Ramaswamy has been on the network four times in the ten days since he announced his run. By the metric of showing up on TV, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appears to be the favorite, appearing on Fox shows four times in three days this week.

There was a time it seemed everyone on the Right spoke with one voice, as if they all received the same talking points of the day and stuck to it. In 2001 they were all saying the outgoing Bill Clinton staff vandalized the White House, for example. Saddam Hussein ordered the 9/11 attacks. Democrats politicized Paul Wellstone’s funeral. John Kerry lied about his war experiences. It doesn’t matter that none of those things were true; the righties got the memo, and they all sang the same tune for days on end. But they can’t pull off that kind of unity any more. And I don’t see them pulling together anytime soon.

Since the 2022 midterms, there have been some polls that put Ron DeSantis on a par with or ahead of Donald Trump in the contest for the GOP presidential nomination next year. But today there are a bunch of new polls that put Trump way out ahead of DeSantis.

Early commentary so far is saying that Trump’s campaign must be doing something better. I personally suspect that the real reason Trump is looking better than DeSantis to the GOP base is that over the past month or so people have gotten a closer look at DeSantis.

Right after the midterms Republicans were pissed at Trump for screwing up the “red wave.”  After the midterms there was much speculation that DeSantis was the not-Trump conservative Republican who might beat Trump. Probably right-leaning independents and moderate Republicans who were done with Trump considered supporting DeSantis. But the steady drumbeat of stories about DeSantis banning books and now DeSantis assuming creative control of Disney World may have spooked all but the hard core Right. And the hard core Right ain’t quittin’ Trump. DeSantis may have peaked already.

Then yesterday some characters of the hard core Right showed up at a DeSantis book signing, apparently wearing pro-Trump T-shirts, and they were turned away. That’s not going to ingratiate DeSantis with the base, either.

In other news — if you need a good laugh, see ‘The maths are hard’: Marjorie Taylor Greene mocked for not understanding what ‘seized’ means at Alternet. Here is the statement that MTG made —

“I want you to know that in 2020 there were 4,800 pounds of fentanyl seized by CBP. But in 2021, fiscal year 2021, it increased to 11,200 pounds of fentanyl was seized by the CBP. That is a direct result of Biden administration failure policies,” said Greene. “Now here we are in – to date, to date, fiscal, fiscal year 2023 – they have already seized 12,500 pounds of fentanyl. The Biden administration is failing this country by not protecting our border and securing our border, and stopping Chinese fentanyl from being brought into our country illegally by the cartels, and people are dying every single day because of it.”

Yeah, how outrageous is it that the Biden Administration is seizing more drugs at the border than Trump did! Oh, wait …

Also, Matt Gaetz got called out for introducing Chinese propaganda into the congressional record. Watch it here.

Oh, gracious, Trump is pissed. From Daily Beast:

Donald Trump is furious with his former ally Rupert Murdoch after the media mogul made astonishing admissions that some of his Fox News hosts “endorsed” lies that the 2020 election had been “stolen.” Murdoch, 91, also said in a deposition unsealed on Monday that he wished his organization had been “stronger in denouncing” the false narrative that the election was rigged by corrupt voting machines. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox News for $1.6 billion over the issue—but the network denies defamation. “Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers, who will again be leaving in droves—they already are,” Trump fumed on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. “There is MASSIVE evidence of voter fraud & irregularities in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump continued, pointing to Dinesh D’Souza’s conspiracy film 2000 Mules as evidence.

The new opposition brief filed by Dominion Voting Systems yesterday was full of new goodies. From Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair:

While Murdoch denied that Fox as a whole endorsed Donald Trump‘s bogus claims of election fraud, Murdoch did pass the buck to Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity, admitting that “they endorsed.” Later in the filing, Murdoch is asked whether he could have told CEO Suzanne Scott or those hosts to take Rudy Giuliani off the air. “I could have. But I didn’t,” he replied. At another point, Murdoch appeared to express regret over his network’s coverage of Trump’s conspiracy theory: “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight.”

There’s quite a good overview of what happened at Fox after the 2020 election as revealed in the Dominion briefs.at the Bulwark, by Amanda Carpenter. It’s titled Exposed: Fox’s Pander-for-Profit Business Model. The Fox News brand had to be protected above all else, and if that meant spreading lies — lies they knew to be lies — to the viewers to keep the ratings up, so be it. What’s interesting to me is that the execs and bobbleheads justified keeping up the pretense as “respecting our viewers,” even though it pretty much reveals they thought their viewers were fools.

Of course, as I wrote back in May 2020, “dealing with American right-wingers is a bit like dealing with hyenas. You can’t reason with them; all you can do is try to placate them so they don’t bite you.” Note that Fox News isn’t covering the Dominion lawsuit, so maybe they’re hoping their viewers don’t find out about it.

And as Hymen Roth told Michael Corleone, “this is the business we’ve chosen.” Don’t ask questions. Stick to business.

Some other tidbits that came out of the new brief. Before the election Rupert Murdoch shared “confidential information” about then-candidate Joe Biden’s campaign ads and debate strategy with Jared Kushner, the filing said. And he had Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott tell Sean Hannity to say “something supportive” about Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham ahead of the 2020 election. Murdoch said, “We cannot lose the Senate if at all possible.” In other words, Murdoch was explicitly using his “news” business on behalf of the GOP. I know that’s not a surprise, but it’s a tad unusual for them to be caught with their pants this far down, so to speak.

All of this has made Kevin McCarthy’s decision to hand House security tapes over exclusively to Tucker Carlson even more appalling. But this didn’t just piss off liberals. From Rolling Stone:

McCarthy’s gift to Carlson immediately triggered a right-wing media feud, and drew the scorn of multiple high-profile Donald Trump allies. And it quickly led to McCarthy getting legally threatened by the former president’s favorite election-attacking pillow mogul who’s using a pair of extremely pro-Trump lawyers, one of whom sued the January 6th House committee.  …

… On Monday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — a close Trump associate who has been one of the largest financial backers of the election-denialism movement since late 2020 — told Rolling Stone he’s now working with two attorneys, Doug Wardlow and Pat McSweeney, to file a lawsuit against McCarthy as soon as within the “next few days.” Lindell says he and his legal team have drafted a suit arguing his streaming program, Lindell TV, is being “injured” and discriminated against by not enjoying equal access to the unreleased Jan. 6 trove. The Trump ally, who often finds himself to the pro-Trump right of Fox News, notes that he doesn’t trust Fox’s “agenda” with these tapes, and dubs McCarthy’s decision “disgusting” and allegedly unconstitutional.

“As you correctly and publicly stated, the footage ‘belong[s] to the American public.’ Accordingly, I request the same access for my media company, Lindell TV,” the MyPillow CEO wrote to McCarthy in a Feb. 23 letter he provided to Rolling Stone. “Please have your staff reach out to me to arrange for access.”

Some other GOP House creatures have also objected to Carlson getting exclusive access. David Kurtz reports at TPM that “House Republicans as a whole aren’t completely onboard with Speaker McCarthy’s wholesale turning over of the Jan. 6 surveillance footage to Tucker Carlson.” Some GOP House members have expressed concerns about security. They also probably understand there’s only so much manipulation Carlson can do, and they’d rather not have more January 6 videos going viral, thanks much. And it’s  bad look to give one guy exclusive access to what amounts to government property.

In other news — let us take a moment to note the end of Disney World as we’ve known it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Monday to take control of municipal services and development for the special zone encompassing Walt Disney World. The move deals a major blow to the company’s ability to operate with autonomy.

DeSantis says that the special district surrounding Disney World has enabled the park to unfairly skirt local rules and building codes.

It’s my understanding that Disney wanted to keep control of its property to be sure that roads stayed in good repair and utilities functioned properly. Their business model depends on presenting a gleaming, perfectly functioning experience. Well, that’s about to end.

“The corporate kingdom finally comes to an end,” DeSantis said during a news conference announcing the move on Monday. “There’s a new sheriff in town, and accountability will be the order of the day.”

The heart of the bill is the appointment of a five-person state board to oversee municipal services, such as fire protection and road maintenance, where Disney World operates.

But the oversight board that DeSantis assembled is a pack of culture warriors, not people experienced with municipal services. The Orlando Sentinel:

A GOP political donor, an evangelical minister who defends Christian nationalism and a co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty group are among the new board members chosen by Gov. Ron DeSantis to oversee Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District.

“It’s incredibly alarming,” state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, said of the governor’s nominees, describing them as a group of “extremists and Republican operatives” picked based on cronyism and not merits. “He has these extremist culture war demagogues, and Republican Party operatives.”

I suggest that if you have “Disney World” on your bucket list, you shouldn’t put it off. There’s no way this won’t negatively impact the place.

Let’s start with this tweet from Esther Crawford, Director of Product Management at Twitter. It’s said Crawford is so loyal to the company she often sleeps in her office rather than go home.

The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. ?

— Esther Crawford ? (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023

Musk fired her today. She must have posted this right after being fired. I take it she’s not ready to go through the stages of grief yet. More from TechCrunch:

Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss.

The layoffs came this weekend after Twitter employees realized they had been cut off from using Slack. While it later came out that Twitter hadn’t paid its Slack bill on time, that’s not why the platform went down. The Platformer reported that someone at Twitter manually shut off access. Many employees worried that this was the first sign of layoffs to come, and while correlation does not equal causation, an entire company being cut off from their main mode of communication as layoffs started dropping like bombs caused confusion and panic all around.

At this point, why would any competent person not absolutely desperate for a job go to work for Elon Musk? Alex Kirshner writes at Slate:

Crawford was the head of Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk has hyped as a key business plank but that has not attracted subscribers in large numbers. She had been as public as anyone in her embrace of Musk’s grindset cultural demands. When people pointed out that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for a leader to promote sleeping at the office, she stood up for it in an extensive thread. Musk, who brags about not sleeping much, probably loved it. Not four months later, Crawford’s payoff for going extremely hardcore was that Musk fired her.

They may well all have been Esther Crawfords. Those latest 200 Twitter layoffs had all remained at the company, or taken jobs there, after Musk made his demands of Twitter and its workplace culture quite clear. All of these people were prepared to stick around long after Musk had slashed everything but his expectations for their performance. These were the workers who were all in. There are many fair reasons for a person to stay in a demanding job with an unsatisfiable boss—money, health insurance, a fear of unemployment, and immigration status all come to mind—but Musk didn’t even give them the choice for long.

It will probably happen again, to more employees, at all of Musk’s companies. (Twitter is not the first Musk firm, or even the most troubling, to have staff sleeping on the floor.) The CEO glorifies the grind in which someone gives nearly their entire self over to their work. But that commitment isn’t a two-way street. …

Now that the world knows this, good luck hiring the best and brightest, dude.

A few days ago Musk fired a top engineer because views of his Tweets had gone down:

Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didn’t just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineers—after his test—and that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Musk’s tweet views might be declining.

The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”

“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.

A principal engineer stepped forward to explain that the decline may be due to easily chartable waning public interest in Musk. To back up the engineer, Twitter employees provided internal data that corresponded with a Google Trends chart, Platformer reported.

You know the rest. Musk threw a fit and fired the engineer for telling him the truth. And, sure enough, a few days after that the Verge reported Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon Musk’s tweets now.

The latest, coming out after Scott Adams’s declaration that Black people are a “hate group” that White people should stay away from —

“The media is racist,” was Musk’s response to the widespread decision to terminate the Dilbert strip. “For a very long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites and Asians.”

He went on to compare US media with elite educational institutions in America where he claimed the “same thing happened”.

It was also reported that Musk deleted a tweet in which he responded to a comment from Adams about his comic strip being dropped, saying, “What exactly are they complaining about?”

Musk is said to have Asperger’s, which partly explains why he is so tone deaf. But that doesn’t explain why he’s such a jerk.

In other news, I see that Tesla stock value has surged recently, making Musk the richest person in the world again.  It’s not clear to me why that happened. Today we learned that some of Tesla shareholders are suing Tesla  for “overstating the effectiveness and safety of their electric vehicles’ Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies,” it says here. So let’s see what that does to the stock price.

“Anything you feed will grow” is an aphorism I heard a long time ago that stuck with me. It’s coming back to me again. See Paul Waldman, Republican elites fear the monster they created. 

On screen, Fox News personalities paint a world of clear heroes and villains, where conservatives are always strong and right and liberals are weak and wrong. But the extraordinary private communications revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox show who they really are. Panicked over Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, those same hosts, and the executives who run the network, cowered in abject terror.

They feared the same monster that keeps House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) up at night, the monster that conservative media and Republican politicians created: base voters who are deluded, angry and vengeful.

At this point, if they stop feeding the monster the monster might eat them. It’s also the case that if they stop feeding the monster, plenty of other news outlets and politicians will step forward with truckloads of juicy, red meat to keep feeding it. And of course the deluded, angry and vengeful base can always get on social media and feed each other.

Is this a beast that can’t be starved? We may never know. Recently Kevin McCarthy handed over House security footage of January 6 to Tucker Carlson so that the beast could be fed.

Ron DeSantis continues his descent into pure fascism with a bill that would end the New York Times v. Sullivan protections of press freedom. He wants to make it easier for people to sue news outlets for libel. This is especially fascinating given that Fox News is currently arguing in court that news outlets ought to be able to lie with impunity under the banner of “free speech.”

More about the DeSantis bill:

Critics of the bill took issue with the section about attorneys fees, saying it could add a financial incentive to file defamation lawsuits and erode the laws preventing retaliatory lawsuits filed to silence criticism. Florida, like other states, has anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) laws designed to help stop frivolous lawsuits.

“One of my largest concerns with the bill is the rolling back of the anti-SLAPP protection for defamation defendants,” said Adam Schulman, a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which advocates for free markets, free speech and limited governments. ”That’s just moving in the wrong direction.”

He said beyond large media companies, some of which have legal teams, the changes could affect the “ordinary guy” who leaves an “unfavorable Yelp review.”

“At one time, it was not considered ‘conservative’ to advocate for turning on the spigot to all sorts of troll-like civil litigation that will line the pockets of bottom-feeding plaintiffs’ lawyers,” Schulman said.

Stern said the new bill would leave those protections “toothless.” Under most anti-SLAPP laws, individuals can recover attorneys’ fees if they can show they were sued in retaliation for criticizing the government.

“The new bill would change that so that plaintiffs whose lawsuits survive anti-SLAPP motions can recover their attorney’s fees,” he said. “That means the anti-SLAPP law would lose all of its value as a deterrent against powerful people filing abusive lawsuits to silence their critics.”

So, basically, DeSantis wants to be on the side of powerful people who want to keep news media off their backs.

DeSantis’s obvious animosity toward free speech is already on the record. As Bess Levin wrote in Vanity Fair,

One of Florida governor Ron DeSantis‘s favorite little mottos is “Florida is where woke goes to die.” In fact, a better, more accurate motto would be “Ron DeSantis’s Florida is where free speech goes to die, unless you’ve agreed to the governor’s list of preapproved talking points, like that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, white people are and have always been awesome, and nonwhite people have nothing to complain about.” 

See also Ron DeSantis’s war on “wokeness” is a war against the First Amendment by Ian Millhiser at Vox.

As a constitutional matter, a governor is allowed to give speeches arguing that the United States is somehow miraculously immune from systemic injustice. He may sign legislation repealing programs intended to cure these injustices. He may appoint officials to public school boards that share his belief that the US is immune to these injustices. And he may even enact policies that help perpetuate these injustices, assuming that those policies violate neither the state nor federal constitution.

But DeSantis goes much further. He wields the government’s sovereign powers to sanction speech he does not like, and to punish institutions that criticize him. DeSantis, in other words, does not seem content to simply enact policies that hew to a right-wing economic or social vision. He wishes to use the sovereign powers of government to shape public discourse itself — punishing some ideas, rewarding others, and conscripting public schools and universities into his culture war.

Basically, what righties want is to be able to spew any ugliness they want to spew without proof, repercussions, or even being disagreed with, but at the same time they want to censor everybody else. They won’t be happy until that’s the America they get to live in. And apparently Ron DeSantis thinks he can become POTUS by promising to give them that America.

I argued yesterday that loosening the the Section 230 protections for social media companies, as righties want to do, will make it harder for them to upload anything they want to the Web, not less. Even some of the old establishment conservative media, like National Review, agree with this. But the MAGA right is convinced that if they could just do away with Section 230 they’ll be able to upload whatever they want to social media without the social media companies deleting it, which is kind of the opposite of the real consequences of ending Section 230.

Here’s something of a change of subject — behold this map —

The map, from WaPo, shows “FICO averages for individuals with credit cards by county as of 2019.” It’s a credit score map, in other words. The darker blue the county, the lower the credit scores. Counties with the highest credit scores are dark gold.

I admit this puzzled me a bit. Yes the South is poorer, but it’s also a lot cheaper to live there. Well, as long as you’re healthy. The people who put this data together found out that the biggest driver of really bad credit scores was medical debt. From the article:

Medical debt may not be the only force behind the South’s credit struggles, but it appears to be a key contributor. So where did it all come from? And why is it concentrated in the South? …

…But health alone does not solve the puzzle: Several Northeastern states struggle with chronic health conditions and have good credit.

A clue to the broader answer comes from a recent analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that medical debt “became more concentrated in lower-income communities in states that did not expand Medicaid” after key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014.

One answer is that the South is simply less healthy than any other region. Data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows that among Medicare recipients, the population for which we have the best data, those in the South are substantially more likely to suffer from four or more chronic conditions. And poor health tends to go hand in hand with people having overdue medical debt and poor credit scores.

Obviously there are exceptions, like some dark blue spots in California. Nevada expanded Medicaid after this was compiled. You can read more about this without the paywall at Truthout.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case that challenges “Section 230,” a provision in law that protects big social media companies from being sued for stuff people upload. For years conservatives have hated Section 230 and complained that if they eliminate it there will be no more censoring of conservative content in social media. This makes absolutely no sense and reinforces my opinion that today’s so-called “conservatives” lack the cognitive skills God gave asparagus.

Josh Hawley recently introduced a bill that would require big social media companies to apply for some sort of certification from the Federal Trade Commission that would require them to not favor one political party over another. I don’t know how you’re going to enforce that, but whatever. Without certification a social media platform could not claim Section 230 protection, meaning those companies would be liable for any harm done by what people post. “Not only would this legislation drastically hurt free speech and competition in the online ecosystem, it would mean more conservative content, not less, will be removed from these websites,” says this guy. Obviously. But some righties can’t see that.

Even National Review warns that narrowing or eliminating Section 203 would cause more censorship of “conservative” content, not less. If companies can be sued for what users upload, those companies will be forced to put all content through much tighter filters. Or else give up and close the site entirely.

Righties complain that Section 230 prevents people from suing social media companies for removing their content. I am not sure that’s what the law does, nor do I think that anybody believes social media companies have some kind of obligation to keep everything everybody posts public and untouched. There can be honest disagreements about what content is harmful or contrary to company standards and what isn’t, of course. And it’s not like the algorithms don’t sometimes bounce leftie content also; it’s just that lefties don’t whine about it so much.

The case in front of the court is explained in this SCOTUSblog post:

The case was filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American woman who was studying in Paris when she was killed in an ISIS attack there in 2015. Their lawsuit alleges that Google, which owns YouTube, violated the Antiterrorism Act’s ban on aiding and abetting terrorism by (among other things) recommending ISIS videos to users through its algorithms, thereby aiding ISIS’s recruitment.

Representing the Gonzalez family, law professor Eric Schnapper told the justices that Section 230 distinguishes between claims that seek to hold internet companies liable for content created by someone else, and claims that seek to hold internet companies liable for their own conduct. Whether an internet company’s recommendations would fall within the latter category would depend on whether they met specific criteria outlined in the text of Section 230, Schnapper contended. But he faced a barrage of questions from justices across the ideological spectrum.

Justice Clarence Thomas has writtenskeptically in recent years about broad immunity under Section 230, but he appeared surprisingly sympathetic to the theory on which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit relied in ruling for Google below – the idea that Section 230 protects recommendations as long as the provider’s algorithm treats content on its website similarly. If the same algorithm that recommends ISIS videos based on a user’s history and interests also recommends cooking videos to someone who is interested in cooking, Thomas asked, how can Google be held responsible for those recommendations?

I doubt the big tech/social media companies (except maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter) have a clear political bias; if anything, they probably skew libertarian. Their only bias is in favor of what makes them money by increasing clicks on content. What the Right is asking for is more censorship of content, not less.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was perhaps most squarely in the Gonzalez family’s corner. In Section 230, she told Blatt, Congress was trying to protect internet platforms that were blocking and screening offensive materials. However, Jackson continued, you are arguing here that Section 230 protects platforms that are promoting offensive materials. “How,” Jackson asked Blatt, “is that even conceptually consistent with what Congress intended?”

So it would seem that Thomas is siding with lefties and Jackson with righties, which ought to give righties pause.

Most commentaries on the hearings are saying that it appears the Court will likely punt this issue to Congress. The justices on the whole don’t seem to want to touch it.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee already are drafting new legislation. And any sentence with the words “Republicans” and “House” should be cause for alarm. This is what they’re considering:

• Limiting the right of tech companies to exclude users based on their viewpoints or political affiliations
• Requiring “reasonable moderation practices” to address harms like illegal drug sales and child exploitation
• Narrowing protected moderation to specific types of speech not protected by the First Amendment
• Removing protection for discriminatory moderation decisions based on viewpoints.

The problem is that one person’s “viewpoint” might well be another person’s “yelling fire in a crowded theater” and not protected by the First Amendment. Posts that spread disinformation about vaccines get people killed, for example. Posts that promote armed insurrection or race wars or shooting abortion doctors probably are not protected by the First Amendment, but try telling a rightie that. If righties are censored more than lefties — and I’ve seen no data showing they are, but righties believe this to be so — maybe it’s because righties are posting more dangerous content. Just a guess.

In other news — In the ongoing Proud Boy seditious conspiracy trial, one Proud Boy testified the group was thinking about “all-out revolution.” From Politico:

A top lieutenant of the Proud Boys’ chairman, Enrique Tarrio, described on Wednesday a growing desperation among the group’s leaders as Jan. 6, 2021, approached and then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results sputtered.

That’s when the group’s thoughts turned to “all-out revolution,” according to Jeremy Bertino, the Justice Department’s star witness in the seditious conspiracy trial of Tarrio and four other Proud Boys leaders, who are charged with orchestrating a violent attempt to derail the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden.

I take it he’s changed his mind.

Also, too: Trump is supposed to be touring East Palestine, Ohio, today. Democrats are using this as an opportunity to revisit Trump’s role in the train derailment.

Donald Trump’s visit to the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio is offering a political opening to battered Biden administration officials — by calling new attention to the former president’s record of rolling back regulations on both rail safety and hazardous chemicals.

Trump’s administration withdrew an Obama-era proposal to require faster brakes on trains carrying highly flammable materials, ended regular rail safety audits of railroads, and mothballed a pending rule requiring freight trains to have at least two crew members. He also placed a veteran of the chemical industry in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety office, where she made industry-friendly changes to how the agency studied health risks.

These actions have mostly been a matter of Trump-era trivia amid the furor over the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, which has brought fierce GOP criticism of the response by Biden appointees such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. But Trump’s Ohio trip on Wednesday is provoking new scrutiny of his own track record — a development that some in the Biden administration were privately welcoming.

Whether the residents of East Palestine will hear any of this, I cannot say.

Demonstrating that he has all the sharp political insights of spinach, Mike Pence has decided to break with Trump on Social Security and Medicare, of all things.

You’ve probably heard about the Fulton County special grand jury forewoman who has been blabbing to the press. I don’t think she revealed anything significant or said anything that would hurt the eventual prosecutions, but we’ll see.

President Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine was gutsy, considering it’s a real war zone and he wasn’t surrounded by U.S. troops. I hope some good comes of it. But I want to talk more about the reactions.

The disloyal opposition is singing its usual song about “America first” and “blank checks.” They are also complaining that because Biden visited Ukraine that means he’s turned his back on East Palestine, Ohio. See, for example, DeSantis says Biden ‘neglecting’ domestic problems with Ukraine trip. Somebody might want to explain to DeSantis that real presidents often do have to handle both foreign and domestic crises at the same time.

In fact, the Biden Administration dispatched all kinds of help to East Palestine. But he didn’t actually go there, see, so the relief doesn’t count.  See As Biden Dispatches Disaster Relief to East Palestine, Trump Takes Credit at Mother Jones. In brief, Trump is claiming that Biden wasn’t going to send help to East Palestine until he, Trump, announced Friday night he was going sometime this week. The White House had already gotten several federal agencies involved in East Palestine before that, although I take it there was a delay in sending FEMA. (But if you go, Donald, be sure to take a lot of deep breaths and drink the water!)

See also Will Bunch’s column from yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer. 

In fact, if residents of East Palestine — a modern news desert of downsized or disappeared news sources, which allows misinformation to fester — truly knew the reality, a delegation of townsfolk would likely greet Trump with Tiki torches and pitchforks bought from the Fuller’s hardware store.

Because the truth is that handed the awesome power of the presidency to actually do something for “forgotten Americans,” Trump’s Oval Office actions protected the rich and the powerful — none more so than the nation’s wildly profitable railroads — over the “ignored, neglected and abandoned” everyday people of places like Columbiana County. Any visit wouldn’t be a victory lap, but more like the tendency of a criminal to return to the scene of his crime.

Trump acted specifically to sabotage a nascent government effort to protect citizens from the growing threat posed by derailments of outdated, poorly equipped and undermanned freight trains that were increasingly shipping both highly flammable crude oil from the U.S. fracking boom as well as toxic chemicals like the ones that would derail in East Palestine.

Maybe it was Trump’s bitter spite toward the man who tried to launch that regulatory drive — Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president. Maybe it was the more than $6 million that the railroad industry, including Norfolk Southern, donated to GOP candidates in 2016, plus millions more spent on lobbying.

Whatever the reason, Trump had been in office for less than a year when he moved to kill the 2015 rule change initiated by the Obama administration that would have required freight trains to upgrade the current braking technology that was developed in the 19th century for state-of-the-art electronic systems. In killing the rule, Trump bought the argument from lobbyists for Norfolk Southern and the rail industry that the upgrade would have cost them $3 billion — six times what the Obama administration found it would cost.

We don’t yet know if the Obama rules would have prevented the accident. But if it’s found that it might have, this needs to make headlines.

And then there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who now is allowed to serve on House committees and has already established a pattern of making a complete fool of herself in them. Here is her reaction.

This is incredibly insulting.

Today on our President’s Day, Joe Biden, the President of the United States chose Ukraine over America, while forcing the American people to pay for Ukraine’s government and war.

I can not express how much Americans hate Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/nHXzG67YOL

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) February 20, 2023

Greene is so “America First” that some of America isn’t First enough for her. She’s been calling for a national divorce.

We need a national divorce.

We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.

Everyone I talk to says this.

From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are… https://t.co/Azn8YF1UUy

— Marjorie Taylor Greene ?? (@mtgreenee) February 20, 2023

She seems unaware that most of the red states would sink into abject poverty if they didn’t have blue state money coming in to bail them out. Also keep in mind that Greene is on the bleeping House Homeland Security Committee while calling for the fracturing of the homeland.

In other news: James O’Keefe has been ousted from Project Veritas by its board of directors. Basically, O’Keefe is an asshole who can’t get along with anybody.

See also: When Lt. Jimmy Carter stopped a nuclear meltdown.