Sunday, October 8, 2023

Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

Republicans have been falsely accusing President Biden of "funding Hamas's attack on Israel through Iran" all weekend, because they are suddenly very concerned with the security of the Jewish state. Secretary of State Tony Blinken called bullshit:

In response to this weekend's expansive attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to "destroy Hamas" and signaled that the country's forces will soon go on the offensive as the IDF evacuates civilians living near the border with Gaza.

Blinken said Sunday that the U.S. would stand behind Israel as it did whatever necessary to ensure "this doesn't repeat itself."

"I don't want to get ahead of what Israel may or may not do when it comes to Gaza," he said when asked whether Israel could control the situation if it invaded. "No country should be expected to live with the fear, the possibility and now the actuality of terrorists crossing a border, coming into people's homes, gunning them down in the street, dragging them across the border and making hostages of them. That is intolerable for any democracy. It's intolerable for Israel."

Republicans have criticized the Biden administration approach toward Iran, Hamas' largest sponsor, contending that the White House in effect enabled the attack and emboldened the extremists by facilitating Iran's access to sanctioned finances for humanitarian expenditures as part of a separate deal to free American detainees.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement that the money transfer was a sign of "appeasement." Other critics said it would free up Iran to better financially support Hamas.

Blinken, on "This Week," pushed back.

"There's a long relationship between Iran and Hamas. In fact, Hamas wouldn't be Hamas without the support that it's gotten over many years from Iran. We haven't yet seen direct evidence that Iran was behind this particular attack or involved," he said.

"It's unfortunate that some are, in effect, saying things that may be motivated by politics at a time when so many lives have been lost and Israel remains under attack," he continued, noting the funds are held in a restricted account monitored by the U.S. Treasury Department.

"By the way, not a single dollar from that account has actually been spent to date," Blinken asserted, adding, "So, some who are advancing this false narrative -- they're either misinformed or they're misinforming. And either way, it's wrong."
 
 
A doctored White House press release posted online falsely claimed that the Biden administration had authorized $8 billion in emergency aid to Israel on Saturday. The fact that it was faked didn't stop it from being posted across the internet and rising to the top of Google search results.

The faked document is one of the most far-reaching instances of misinformation to come out of the most recent violent conflict between Hamas and Israel, fooling several online publications into writing full articles about the fake news, which are still surfacing prominently in online search results.

The faked document appears to be an edited version of President Joe Biden's July memo announcing $400 million in aid to Ukraine. Despite images of the faked document appearing on social media, it was never published on the White House website or in the government's Federal Register of presidential documents.

The faked document first started appearing on social media accounts Saturday morning. Around noon on Saturday, a collection of verified accounts on X, formerly Twitter, began disseminating the fake release. Verified accounts are eligible for monetization on the platform.

Posts sharing the faked document and its claims, many of which are still up, have accrued hundreds of thousands of views on the platform.

Several of the posts on X now have "community notes" attached to them clarifying that the document is faked, but many more posts that are still up have no such clarification.

Under Elon Musk's ownership, Twitter has scaled back its operations which would have attempted to moderate misinformation on the platform.

As the fake release spread on X, it was reposted to other social media websites like TikTok, but on a much smaller scale. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
 
 It's all very, very bonkers, but of course the Netanyahu administration hates President Biden. Of course, this is convenient for Israel here.

Expect a lot more of this.

Beshear Audacity Of It All, Con't

 As we close in on the final month before Kentucky goes to the polls to determine whether or not Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear gets to keep his job, a new Emerson College poll finds the incumbent with a huge lead going into the 30-day mark.
 
A new poll from Emerson College and Fox 56 shows Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear with a commanding 16-point lead over Republican nominee attorney general Daniel Cameron.

Out of 450 registered Kentucky voters polled Oct. 1-3, 49% told the independent, nonpartisan pollster they would vote for Beshear if an election between him and Cameron were held today. 33% said they would vote for Cameron. 13% of the respondents were undecided, and 5% said they’d vote for “someone else” despite there being no one else on the ballot.

With 450 registered voters surveyed, the margin of error on the results is +/-4.6%.

The 16-point lead is the largest in any publicly released poll, by a wide margin. Polls conducted from June to late September showed Beshear with anywhere from a 10-point lead to mid-single digits. A poll recently released by the conservative group Club For Growth showed Cameron down six percentage points to Beshear but gaining on the governor in the month of September.

Elections analysis website fivethirtyeight.com gives Emerson College an “A-” rating as a pollster.

Beshear’s campaign has outspent Cameron’s significantly throughout the general election season. Even with multiple political action committees (PACs) supporting Cameron, the amount of pro-Beshear advertisements on television thus far this month has outnumbered Cameron and groups supporting him. During the first full week of October, $1.8 million was spent on ads supporting Beshear compared to roughly $600,000 on ads for Cameron.

Unlike in 2019 — when Beshear defeated controversial former GOP governor Matt Bevin by a razor-thin 0.4 percentage point, 5,000-vote margin — there is no third-party candidate on the ballot this year. In 2019, Libertarian candidate John Hicks received 2% of the vote.

The responses to the poll roughly match up with Kentucky voters’ political behavior in a couple key ways: a majority voted for former Republican president Donald Trump in 2020, and most of them do not like current Democratic President Joe Biden. 55% said they voted for Trump in 2020 while 32% said they voted for Biden — Trump won that election 62-36.

In Kentucky, roughly 46% of registered voters are Republican, 44% are registered Democrat and a little more than 10% are registered as something else, according to State Board of Elections data from September.

However, the responses indicate the population surveyed was registered Democrat at a much lower rate than Kentucky voters on the whole and registered as independent at a much higher rate than the commonwealth’s voters. 31% said they were Democrats, 47% said they were Republicans and 22% said they were Independent or “other” when asked about their party registration.
 
Oversampling of independents isn't a huge deal in a state where basically one in five Democrats are Joe Manchin. If anything, it favors the huge lead.for Beshear.
 
People like the guy. He's been a good governor, he's personable and charismatic, his dad Steve was governor for eight years and like his father, Andy won because the Republican running for reelection was an asshole (back then it was Ernie Fletcher and his state hiring scandal).

Then again, Matt Bevin surprised everyone in 2015 when what the pollsters said was a big Jack Conway win turned into a nine-point loss, so badly called that it spelled the end of the state's biggest polling firm at the time.

So yeah, I'm taking an entire salt mine with these results. Beshear needs to run like he's nine points down, because for all we know, he is.

Sunday Long Read: Pool Fools

Devin Friedman wanted a pool. The pool contractor wanted him to pay by app, in this case, mobile banking app, Zelle. And in our Sunday Long Read this week, we find out how Devin and his wife spent $31,500 on a pool that wasn't a pool, but a scam.
 
I was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.

Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.

"I'm sorry, Gary is not available right now," said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.

As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn't have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary's wife, but I couldn't imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary.

"Do you know where he is?" I said. "This is urgent."

"Um. And who is this?" said Cheryl.

I gave her my name and her tone changed a bit.

"I see," she said tightly. "Well, I'll tell him that you called. Again."

"Please do," I said, trying to sound both grateful and angry. Then I hung up.

It's true that my wife and I had been calling Gary a lot. About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard. It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame. And thanks to the support of my friends and family, I was able to bury my feelings deep inside and become invested in the idea of having a pool. A pool could be evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. When I found myself at a party with intimidating people, I would sometimes say to myself, I am a person with a swimming pool, so I could believe I had the same right to exist as anyone else. And people would have to be friends with me, right? Because who doesn't want a friend with a pool? It would be like when Jeff Allen's mom used to let him have pool parties at his house in eighth grade. Sure, after everyone ate all the grilled cheeses his mom had cut into triangles and sneaked shots of vodka and then thrown up in the bushes, they all left and didn't invite him to come along. But wasn't that better than sitting at home alone on a Friday night, which was probably what Jeff would have been doing otherwise? Wasn't that a win?

(Side note: Jeff grew up to be a heavy Facebook poster who writes screeds about how if people are so sure a man has a right to marry a man, then shouldn't a man have the right to marry a dog? He lives in Tennessee now with his wife, Krystal, whom he proposed to by having a trained dolphin swim up to her strapped with an engagement ring. Some people stay true to themselves.)

Originally, the pool work was supposed to commence in April 2020. But obviously that didn't happen, because that was when everyone was sealed in their homes rinsing groceries in a solution of three parts water to one part Clorox. But now it was 2021. The construction trade was beginning to lurch back to life. There were delays, of course. We were in the throes of the great pandemic renovation boom, and there weren't enough workers or materials. Container ships were lined up for miles at the ports, and the cost of lumber had become something normal people talked about. The New York Times was publishing hate-reads about people from cities moving to places like the Berkshires and building swimming pools and bringing their obnoxious, demanding, me-first city culture with them.

And so that March, we began calling Gary to say me first. Can you ensure we'll be first in line once the ground thaws? He'd try, he said. We took that as a promise.

We called him in April. We called him in May. The further into summer we got, the less responsive he became. If you've hired a contractor, this will sound familiar. Why answer the phone just to get yelled at by some people from a New York Times hate-read? June crept along, and Gary went completely dark. We were anxious. We felt wronged. We let our feelings be known: Gary, and here I'm paraphrasing our email, we Karen-ed our way into being first in line to build a pool in the spring and now here it is in the middle of summer and we literally cannot get ahold of you.

Finally, on July 5, we received a response. Gary emailed us that he was ready to begin. He said he could start within the week and reminded us that, according to the contract, we owed him $30K-plus before construction commenced. We checked the contract and saw that he was right. He sent another email with instructions for payment. Because a lot of bank branches were still closed, and the crew wanted their money, he requested that we transfer the money via Zelle. But because there are daily Zelle limits, he said, we should just transfer a little bit every day.

We Zelle-ed $3,500 on the 6th, $3,500 on the 7th, $5,000 on the 8th and again on the 9th. Now that he was getting his money, Gary was more responsive. Do you have all the materials you were waiting for, we asked in an email. Yep, mostly. Can you start next week? Yes. The emails were strange. We sometimes had to read them aloud: What if you put a period here, would it make sense then? What if there were a verb? But Gary's emails had always been weird. After all, you don't go into the Cheryls business because you care about the syntax in your electronic correspondence. This man ran his company from an AOL account, which I didn't even know you could still have.

After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit? We asked him to send us a signed receipt for the $23,000-ish we'd sent. Certainly, he said, I'm on a job, give me a few minutes. A few minutes later we got a signed receipt from Royal Palace Pools and Spas, printed on letterhead and photographed. All we had to do was send another $3,500 on the 12th and another $5,000 the 13th, his start date. If things went our way, the construction would be finished in a few weeks.

And then July 13 arrived. Early that morning we received an email from Gary that he was down the road with his crew and would be there imminently. But hours passed, and he didn't show. That's when we reached Cheryl and she said, "Oh, it's you," and told me she'd get him a message. We started calling every 15 minutes. This guy had taken our money and who knows when — or if — he was ever going to start building us a hate-read-worthy swimming pool.

Then, early that afternoon, we got Gary on the phone. Yellllow he said. We asked him where he was. He was confused by that. He was at the office, he said. But you told us you were on your way here, we said. You emailed us and said you were already on the road.

Gary was silent for a moment.

"I haven't emailed you in a month," he said.

Then my wife said holy fuck.
 
Zelle made it astonishingly easy to pay "Gary" and also astonishingly easy to scam Devin. The cautionary tale here this week is in an era of massive disinformation, that information can also include the ones and zeroes in your checking account. It's the biggest P2P banking app in Americ, way bigger than Venmo. And the fraud and scam potential for it is massive.

And worse, nobody's actually responsible for covering that fraud, because there are no laws or backstop behind it like bank deposits and the FDIC for example. On top of that, the one federal agency that should be involved, the Consumer Banking Protection Bureau, is currently facing a Supreme Court case that argues that the entire agency is unconstitutional, because the banks and the GOP want it gone.

So yes, take Devin's pool as an example. Be careful out there.
 
Be careful out there.