Sunday Long Read: The School Shooting Survivor's Club

Our Sunday Long Read this week finds that we've had so many school shootings in America that there's now a dedicated support network for school principals to deal with the pain and death of what is becoming more and more an annual sacrifice ritual across the country to the Second Amendment.

IT WAS A cold, breezy morning in April 2019 when the club gathered for the first time. None of those present had asked to be part of this club, but they were the ones who answered its call, 12 men and five women, mostly strangers then.

They collected their coffees, took seats around the table in the conference room in Reston, Virginia, and looked at one another under the fluorescent lights.

Greg Johnson, the principal of a small Ohio high school called West Liberty-Salem, felt awkward. They all knew what they had in common. But do you ask about the awful thing right away, or wait?

Frank DeAngelis felt moved. Over the years, and with dread, the former principal of Columbine High School in Colorado had watched the ranks of his fellowship grow, had in fact called new members to tell them they’d joined what he dubbed the club where no one wants to join. Now here they were, so many in one room.

Ty Thompson felt guarded. A year after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, lawsuits and investigations loomed. He wasn’t sure what he could and couldn’t say.

One by one, the principals shared. When Johnson confessed that more than two years after the shooting at West Liberty-Salem he still wrestled with doubts about his ability to support his students and staff, he was relieved to see heads nodding. Thompson was struck by how immediately these strangers felt safe with one another, how some group members unloaded like it was therapy. They talked about the loss of young lives that haunted them, the guilt they felt as survivors, and how they questioned what they could have done differently. Someone asked: What are you doing for self-care? Silence. Then Johnson spoke up: “Who has time for self-care?” More heads nodded.

Andy McGill, Johnson’s assistant principal at West Liberty-Salem, remained quiet. As he listened to DeAngelis talk about Columbine and Thompson talk about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, what happened at his school began to seem trivial. No one had died during their shooting, thankfully. What was he doing in this room?

That night, McGill went to the hotel bar with a group that included DeAngelis. There, a former assistant principal from New York named Michael Bennett, who was shot confronting a gunman in 2004, began to express what McGill had been feeling—that there had been no fatalities at his school’s shooting and his presence here was a mistake. But DeAngelis cut him off with what would become one of the club’s party lines: You don’t compare tragedies. Trauma is trauma. At the next day’s meeting, McGill felt better. DeAngelis was right. The most important thing they could do was help others.

The club emerged from that 2019 meeting as the Principal Recovery Network (PRN), a support group for principals whose schools have experienced gun violence. Grimly, since the PRN was founded, both its workload and membership have grown—46 shootings occurred at K–12 schools in 2022, more than in any year since Columbine, according to Washington Post data. The PRN today is composed of 21 current and former leaders from schools including Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; Marjory Stoneman Douglas; and Columbine. When gun violence strikes, the PRN reaches out to the principal, offering emotional support and advice on everything from how to reopen a school to how to commemorate the one-year mark. In 2022, the group released a handbook of its best practices: The NASSP Principal Recovery Network Guide to Recovery. But the most valuable resource the PRN offers may be its simplest: the opportunity to connect with others who have been through the same thing.

The principals realized at that first meeting in 2019 that while their shootings were different, many of their experiences were similar. As they led their communities forward, they faced common challenges, which unfolded in a similar sequence. Today, as the PRN, they offer their experiences as a guide, in hopes they might help others find smoother passage through. On the other side of the hardship, the principals promise, there can be healing.

But the story must begin with the horror. Because the horror, unfortunately, is how you join the club. 

 

More principals will join this club every month. More kids will join the ranks of those killed in these shootings. And more and more of us are throwing up our hands and accepting that this is how it has to be, and that the only solution is more and more death.

It doesn't have to be, but that starts with no electing the people who want to arm everyone and watch us shoot each other.

Last Call For America's Kids Getting Zucked Up

A huge multistate lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta was announced this week as 41 states are suing the social media giant over addicting tens of millions of kids on purpose. 

 

Dozens of states sued Instagram-parent Meta on Tuesday, accusing the social media giant of harming young users’ mental health through allegedly addictive features such as infinite news feeds and frequent notifications that demand users’ constant attention.

In a federal lawsuit filed in California by 33 attorneys general, the states allege that Meta’s products have harmed minors and contributed to a mental health crisis in the United States.

“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” said Letitia James, the attorney general for New York, one of the states involved in the federal suit. “Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable.”

Eight additional attorneys general sued Meta on Tuesday in various state courts around the country, making similar claims as the massive multi-state federal lawsuit.

And the state of Florida sued Meta in its own separate federal lawsuit, alleging that Meta misled users about potential health risks of its products.

Tuesday’s multistate federal suit — filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California — accuses Meta of violating a range of state-based consumer protection statutes, as well as a federal children’s privacy law known as COPPA that prohibits companies from collecting the personal information of children under 13 without a parent’s consent.

“Meta’s design choices and practices take advantage of and contribute to young users’ susceptibility to addiction,” the complaint reads. “They exploit psychological vulnerabilities of young users through the false promise that meaningful social connection lies in the next story, image, or video and that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation.”

The federal complaint calls for court orders prohibiting Meta from violating the law and, in the case of many states, unspecified financial penalties.

“We share the attorneys generals’ commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online, and have already introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families,” Meta said in a statement. “We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path.”

The wave of lawsuits is the result of a bipartisan, multistate investigation dating back to 2021, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said at a press conference Tuesday, after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen came forward with tens of thousands of internal company documents that she said showed how the company knew its products could have negative impacts on young people’s mental health.

“We know that there were decisions made, a series of decisions to make the product more and more addictive,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti told reporters. “And what we want is for the company to undo that, to make sure that they are not exploiting these vulnerabilities in children, that they are not doing all the little, sophisticated, tricky things that we might not pick up on that drive engagement higher and higher and higher that allowed them to keep taking more and more time and data from our young people.”

Tuesday’s multipronged legal assault also marks the newest attempt by states to rein in large tech platforms over fears that social media companies are fueling a spike in youth depression and suicidal ideation.

“There’s a mountain of growing evidence that social media has a negative impact on our children,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, “evidence that more time on social media tends to be correlated with depression with anxiety, body image issues, susceptibility to addiction and interference with daily life, including learning.”

The suits follow a raft of legislation in states ranging from Arkansas to Louisiana that clamp down on social media by establishing new requirements for online platforms that wish to serve teens and children, such as mandating that they obtain a parent’s consent before creating an account for a minor, or that they verify users’ ages.

 

I predict a big multibillion dollar settlement, followed by hefty new rules for social media in the US concerning children for Meta in order to head off federal regulations, but I don't think that will hold for long. If Meta really did make as an addictive product as possible, they're going to deserve all the legal smoke they can get.

Sunday Long Read: Scare Apparent

For Halloween this week, our Sunday Long Read is Scientific American's look at why we love to be scared and the science behind it. From Darwin to today, researchers say "scary play" is a necessary way to explore our world as social creatures.

Chain saws roar, and spine-chilling screams echo from behind a dense wall of trees. You know you're at a scary attraction in the woods of Denmark called Dystopia Haunted House, yet everything sounds so real. As you walk into the house, you become disoriented in a dark maze filled with strange objects and broken furniture; when you turn a corner, you're confronted by bizarre scenes with evil clowns and terrifying monsters reaching out for you. Then you hear the chain saw revving up, and a masked man bursts through the wall. You scream and start running.

This might sound like the kind of place nobody would ever want to be in, but every year millions of people pay to visit haunts just like Dystopia. They crowd in during Halloween, to be sure, but show up in every other season, too. This paradox of horror's appeal—that people want to have disturbing and upsetting experiences—has long perplexed scholars. We devour tales of psychopathic killers on true crime podcasts, watch movies about horrible monsters, play games filled with ghosts and zombies, and read books that describe apocalyptic worlds packed with our worst fears.

This paradox is now being resolved by research on the science of scary play and morbid curiosity. Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges—those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in.

The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.

The monkeys were “satiating their horror,” as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom—it's called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles.

At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.

What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger...or at least it gives us working data on how to handle things that go bump in the night. 

A Bleak Test Case For College

A new NY Times analysis finds that rich kids score far higher on SATs/ACTs than poor kids, which is news something akin to "the sun is a burny hot fusion sphere" because it was true when I was in college 30 years ago, but it's even more true now and to an even more astonishing degree.

 

New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.

One-third of the children of the very richest families scored a 1300 or higher, while less than 5 percent of middle-class students did, according to the data, from economists at Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard. Relatively few children in the poorest families scored that high; just one in five took the test at all.

The researchers matched all students’ SAT and ACT scores for 2011, 2013 and 2015 with their parents’ federal income tax records for the prior six years. Their analysis, which also included admissions and attendance records, found that children from very rich families are overrepresented at elite colleges for many reasons, including that admissions offices give them preference. But the test score data highlights a more fundamental reason: When it comes to the types of achievement colleges assess, the children of the rich are simply better prepared.

The disparity highlights the inequality at the heart of American education: Starting very early, children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest. And in the last five decades, as the country has become more unequal by income, the gap in children’s academic achievement, as measured by test scores throughout schooling, has widened.

“Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten,” said Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

“On average,” he added, “our schools aren’t very good at undoing that damage.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action, there has been revived political momentum to address the ways in which many colleges favor the children of rich and white families, such as legacy admissions, preferences for private school students, athletic recruitment in certain sports and standardized tests.

Yet these things reflect the difference in children’s opportunities long before they apply for college, Professor Reardon said. To address the deeper inequality in education, he said, “it’s 18 years too late.”

The children of the top 0.1 percent, whose parents earned an average of $11.3 million a year in today’s dollars, got far better scores than even the children of the families just below them, the new data shows. For the 12,000 students in this group, opportunities that drive achievement were amplified — exclusive private schools, summers traveling the world and college prep services that cost more than college itself — said John N. Friedman, an economist at Brown, who analyzed the new data with Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard.

But the larger inequality is between the children of the merely rich and those below them. As class differences have grown more extreme, and a college degree has become more crucial to achieving a middle-class lifestyle or better, it has bred competition among parents anxious about their children’s futures.

“People are kind of jockeying to get into the school district that they think is going to be most beneficial for their kid,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, who studies inequality in education. “A lot of this is driven by rising income inequality. When people have more money to spend on stuff, they’re spending it on moving to an affluent neighborhood, or buying their kids test prep and tutors and all these things they think will help them.”

 

And why wouldn't parents help their kids with college test prep? Mine did. The more money you have available, the more assistance you can buy. It's an investment that pays off in the millions over the course of a career.

 

And remember, these numbers are from ten years ago, 2011, 2013, and 2015. It's even worse now in the post-pandemic, assistive-AI, post-affirmative action era of 2023 which we're only now starting to experience.

 

The book on this era of college admissions is being written now, and if you thought disparity was bad before, well...

Orange Meltdown, Con't

On Monday, Judge Tanya Chutkan made it very clear about what will happen if Trump continues to attack her, prosecutors, witnesses, and other court officers in Jack Smith's January 6th case against him, as the judge issued a partial gag order against Trump's social media tirades.

A federal judge on Monday issued a gag order on former President Donald Trump, limiting what he can say about special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution into his alleged attempt to subvert in the 2020 presidential election.

The order restricts Trump’s ability to publicly target court personnel, potential witnesses, or the special counsel and his staff. The order did not impose restrictions on disparaging comments about Washington, DC, – where the jury will take place – or certain comments about the Justice Department at large, both of which the government requested.

“This is not about whether I like the language Mr. Trump uses,” Judge Tanya Chutkan said. “This is about language that presents a danger to the administration of justice.”

“His presidential candidacy does not give him carte blanche to vilify public servants who are simply doing their jobs,” the judge added.

Chutkan noted that any violation of her orders could result in sanctions.

Following the two federal indictments against the former president, Trump has lashed out against prosecutors, potential witnesses and the judge overseeing the election subversion case in Washington. Prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s office say these comments are enough to warrant a narrow restriction on Trump’s speech around the case.

Chutkan, often the target of Trump’s attacks, warned the former president that comments he or his attorneys make could threaten the case.

“Mr. Trump is a criminal defendant. He is facing four felony charges. He is under the supervision of the criminal justice system and he must follow his conditions of release,” Chutkan said Monday during the hearing.

“He does not have the right to say and do exactly what he pleases. Do you agree with that?” she asked Trump attorney John Lauro, who responded: “100%.”

 

First, Judge Chutkan is making it clear sanctions -- real ones -- are on the table.

 

Second, she's making it clear that those sanctions could affect the conditions of Trump's release on bail.

 

Trump's not going to listen, of course. In fact, he immediately attacked Judge Chutkan on social media Monday afternoon.

 

Just hours after a federal judge handed down a gag order which prohibits him from publicly targeting witnesses, prosecutors, and court staff, former President Donald Trump went on a tirade against the judge, likely violating the order almost immediately.

He made the comments during a campaign speech in Clive, Iowa, calling the order “totally unconstitutional” while claiming that Judge Tanya Chutkan’s “whole life is not liking me.”

Trump later said: “I am willing to go to jail if that’s what it takes for our country to win and become a democracy again.” 

 

So what will happen when he goes nuts again and again on social media again this week? Will Judge Chutkan martyr Trump like he wants?

 

We're going to find out.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Alexa Edition

The thing with AI is that as with any computer database, if you feed it garbage input, it'll give you garbage output, and that applies to Amazon's Alexa digital assistant just like any other search engine or social media outlet.

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

Amazon declined to explain why its voice assistant draws 2020 election answers from unvetted sources.

“These responses were errors that were delivered a small number of times, and quickly fixed when brought to our attention,” Amazon spokeswoman Lauren Raemhild said in a statement. “We continually audit and improve the systems we have in place for detecting and blocking inaccurate content.”

Raemhild said that during elections, Alexa works with “credible sources” like Reuters, Ballotpedia and RealClearPolitics to provide real-time information.

After The Washington Post reached out to Amazon for comment, Alexa’s responses changed.

To questions The Post had flagged to the company, Alexa answered, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that.” Other questions still prompt the device to say there was election fraud in 2020.

Jacob Glick, who served as investigative counsel on the Jan. 6 committee, called Alexa’s assertions nearly three years after the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol “alarming.”

“If major corporations are helping to give life to the ‘big lie’ years after the fact, they’re enabling the animating narrative of American domestic extremism to endure,” said Glick, who now serves as a policy counsel at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. “They should be doing everything they can to stop the ‘big lie’ in its tracks, lest we see history repeat itself.”

They should be, but why would they bother when the Biden administration is suing the pants off of Amazon over antitrust violations? If I'm an evil tech billionaire like Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg, I'm putting my thumb on the scale to turn the country over to Trump and the fascists in order to get a better deal.

The point is that nobody should be surprised that three years later that Alexa is drawing on Big Lie bullshit and spreading it to tens of millions. We're at the point where The Big Lie has been "fact" to a majority of the GOP since November 2020.

Why wouldn't Big Tech look the other way?

Last Call For No Solving For X

As we come up on the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over X/Twitter/Whatever, Miles Klee at Rolling Stone documents the atrocities as the once-premiere social media platform is now a toxic neo-Nazi-filled trash fire destined for the wrecking ball.

ON OCT. 26, 2022, Elon Musk enjoyed his first and last good day as the head of Twitter (now X). Following a $44 billion acquisition he tried to scuttle but was legally forced into closing, he attempted a bit of prop comedy — entering the company’s headquarters with a porcelain sink while flashing a mischievous smile. It was all the setup to a groaner of a pun announcing his arrival: “Let that sink in!” he declared in the video caption of his entrance. It was a master class in cringe.

Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022

Nearly a year later, you’d be hard pressed to name a single improvement to the site under Musk’s direction. His biggest ideas have all blown up in his face: An $8 monthly subscription fee for a blue check that verified users then needed the option of hiding to avoid mockery. The abandonment of a valuable brand name and logo in favor of the meaningless “X,” which prompted a trademark lawsuit and led to the installation of a garish metal X structure on the roof of Twitter’s office — city inspectors had it removed just days later. Musk’s latest move is to have headlines stripped from article links, leaving only an image and media source, which he seems to believe looks better and will keep users scrolling. But for those who follow news on the app, it makes X that much more pointless.

i love clicking on a stock Getty image and having no clue what the article is going to be about, great job https://t.co/vYpw9aYgIZ— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) October 4, 2023

Of course, these mistakes pale in comparison to the rancid vibes Musk has cultivated by reinstating right-wing extremists and peddlers of misinformation previously banned from the platform, amplifying their conspiracy theories, and ensuring their garbage posts are shoved into “For You” feeds by Twitter’s algorithms. He buys into white supremacist propaganda, panders to anti-LGBTQ hate accounts, and, with advertisers fleeing these intolerable conditions, found a way to blame the catastrophic loss of revenue on a Jewish civil rights group that combats antisemitism.

How much longer can this wreckage of a formerly semi-functional website stay afloat? Although it has shed millions of daily active users since Musk started tinkering with it, the endgame is more likely to come down to money. Seven banks led by Morgan Stanley hold some $13 billion in debt after backing Musk’s blockbuster deal last year, and the company itself is presumably worth much less at this point — even according to his own math. If X can’t keep making its $300 million quarterly interest payments, the financial firms may repossess it in order to recoup a fraction of their losses.

 

I'm still in the camp that says Elongated Muskrat is doing this on purpose, that he spent tens of billions on Twitter in order to destroy it ahead of the 2024 elections in order to sow chaos going into the 2024 elections. With Facebook/Threads/Whatever now out of the election integrity game, there's little hope to stop voters from being targeted with voting disinformation to a degree that it could throw the entire ballgame to the GOP and Trump's promised authoritarian takeover attempt of the federal government.

 

Whether or not voters can see the light in all this coming darkness, well, we have to try to light the way.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump continues to attack judges, prosecutors and court officers running his criminal and fraud trials on social media, despite now being under multiple gag orders, and as I have been saying for a while now, he's doing it on purpose in order to dare someone to put him in jail.

Trump continued to complain online after arriving in court on Wednesday.

"Just arrived at the Witch Hunt Trial taking place in the very badly failing (so sadly!) State of New York, where people and companies are fleeing by the thousands," he wrote. "Corrupt Attorney General, Letitia James, is a big reason for this. Statute 63(12) is meant to be used for Consumer Fraud. It has never been used before on a 'case' such as this, especially since I did absolutely nothing wrong. I borrowed money, paid it back, in full, and got sued, years later, with a trial RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY CAMPAIGN. I am not even entitled, under any circumstances, to a JURY. This Witch Hunt cannot be allowed to continue. It is Election Interference and the start of Communism right here in America!"

"Despite the gag order — which again, is limited only to the judge's staff — Trump is back on Truth Social this morning with a post taking aim at New York Attorney General Tish James and filled with words from a Trump legal bingo card," tweeted MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.

Attorney Bradley Moss argued that the post itself "does not cross the line," opining that "this post was reviewed by the lawyers" before it was sent.

While the Truth Social posts may not have violated the judge's order, some legal experts predicted that he would "almost certainly" violate it.

"If we're gonna ask, is Trump gonna violate a gag order? Almost certainly, yes," former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC. "It's more likely that he'll violate the gag order than almost anything... I mean, we're talking a significant probability he's going to violate the gag order, and then the question is: Will the judge at that point take the really heavy medicine of putting a former president in jail, or will there be some sort of warning and monetary fine first?" he said, adding he expects the latter but the outcome would depend on exactly how Trump violates the order.

"It's kind of like failing kindergarten," Katyal added. "To get a gag order imposed, you have to try. Trump managed to work at it and do it. And succeed. But it took a lot of work on his part. Now, I think the judge is basically saying, you attack a member of my staff, there will be serious sanctions, including even up to jail."

CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams suggested during Wednesday's edition of "CNN This Morning" that a prison stint is the only way to get the former president to comply with the gag order.

"In order to have a serious sanction against a defendant who's a billionaire, you really have to be sanctioning him hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars to really sort of stick it to him," Williams said. "And that's just not going to happen under the laws of New York court policy or procedure.

"You could put him in prison," he continued, addressing host Poppy Harlow. "You could do that. It's less likely but it's certainly doable and, frankly, Poppy, that's the one thing I think will work at this point because — just think about it — nothing has worked whether it is warnings, threats of gag orders or anything else. You've got one penalty left, right?" 

 

Luckily, Judge Engoron still has other options other than trying to jail Trump.

 

Trial attorney Bernard Alexander, who specialized in employment law and civil rights cases, told Insider, however, that Trump is unlikely to incur those kinds of penalties even if Engoron finds he's failed to comply with the gag order. Any decision the court makes, Alexander said, will have to strike a balance between maintaining the former president's right to free speech and the legal objective of holding a fair trial.

"For one thing, the judge can prevent Trump's legal team from presenting certain evidence. But judges prefer not to put their thumb on the scales of justice that way," Alexander told the outlet, adding that if Trump's trial had a jury, the judge could instruct the jury to consider the violation in their decision.

Alexander went on to say that the court could also impose a fine against Trump, "but that would be meaningless," and noted that judges in civil cases usually don't order people to go to jail, so Engoron will have to be creative in the sanction he chooses to issue to dissuade Trump from theoretically continuing to violate the order.

"Trump has money and he uses it to bully people. He can keep paying fines amounting to thousands of dollars – which is what would have to be imposed in a case like this – without giving it a second thought," Alexander told Insider. "The sanction must be something effective to reign Trump in, in order for him to take it seriously."

Alexander expressed that he was not surprised the order was issued and deemed it the correct course of action for Engoron.

"The judge is trying to maintain the integrity of the court and proceed with as light a touch as possible to allow the case to progress without any hint that the court is being impartial. The more Trump violates the rules, the more the judge has to act to maintain integrity and control," he said.

 

Trump is trying to get into as much trouble as possible in order to raise MAGA outrage and to sink the entire legal process.  Trump is already appealing the fraud liability finding by Judge Engoron even as the trial continues. It's a mess but a calculated one. 

Trump is trying to break the system to the point where it can't be used to punish him. We keep saying that Trump is not above the law, but he's also an unprecedented bad actor with considerable power to harm the country. Keep that in mind.

And no, he's not going to get locked up for violating gag orders as Liz Dye explains.

 

Shorn of all of the BS, Trump’s argument against a gag order boils down to “I’m running for president, and telling me to keep quiet is going to be a massive interference in the political process.” There’s also an unspoken element of “You and what army?”

The reality is that, absent a conviction, no judge is going to lock up the former president, who is running to return to office and who has a secret service detail and millions of angry followers. In some sense, every party to this transaction already knows that the court simply cannot treat Trump like any other defendant. And so they’re trying to fashion a solution which will nudge the former president to behave slightly better, knowing that a severe restriction is likely to provoke a showdown which will gum up the works for everyone.

In practical effect, this boils down to putting the squeeze on Trump’s lawyers and hoping that they’ll do their best to keep their client in line.

In an earlier round of motions, prosecutors argued for a protective order blocking Trump from disclosing any evidence turned over in discovery. Trump’s lawyers howled that this was a violation of their client’s First Amendment rights, just as they’re doing now. Judge Chutkan wound up imposing a narrower order blocking the disclosure of “sensitive information” such as grand jury transcripts, witness interviews, and personally identifying information. In practical effect, she ordered Trump not to post witness information on Truth Social.

But more than that, she imposed an obligation on Trump’s lawyers to safeguard that information by refusing to let Trump keep copies or take notes on it. And she put the kibosh on Trump’s plans to share that information with “volunteer attorneys or others without paid employment arrangements to assist with the preparation of this case” — a category of people which might include unindicted co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Trump’s fixer Boris Epshteyn. By placing the onus on Trump’s counsel to control the flow of sensitive information, Judge Chutkan has so far managed to keep Trump from posting it online. Because while no judge wants the chaos that will come from sanctioning Donald Trump for his speech, they’ll happily sanction his lawyers in a heartbeat.

Trump’s desire to postpone his trial provides another lever Judge Chutkan can use to keep him in line. At an August hearing on the parameters of the first protective order, she tacitly warned Trump that the more he potentially poisoned the jury pool, the less inclined she would be to delay the trial.

“Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel, if they can be reasonably interpreted to intimidate witnesses or to prejudice potential jurors, can threaten the process,” she said. “The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case which could taint the jury pool … the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.”

Judge Chutkan has scheduled an October 16 hearing on the motion for a gag order. This would not appear to indicate that she views the matter of Trump’s social media posts as particularly urgent. In the meantime, the former president has directed most of his ranting toward Justice Engoron as the New York trial unfolds this week. Perhaps the sheer volume of Trump’s legal woes will keep him out of trouble with judges, if only because every time he gets tempted to do something deeply damaging in one case, he’ll be distracted by proceedings in another.

 

Having said all that, Trump's going to continue to Trump. Whether or not real pain can even be applied to him, well, we'll see.

Red State Dead, Redemptionless

The post-Obama era red state wave across the Midwest and South over the last decade has turned back decades of progress for tens of millions of Americans, including life expectancy numbers that are plummeting like rocks in the ocean, and there's no better example of how Republicans are killing their own constituents than Ohio.

Americans are more likely to die before age 65 than residents of similar nations, despite living in a country that spends substantially more per person on health care than its peers.

Many of those early deaths can be traced to decisions made years ago by local and state lawmakers over whether to implement cigarette taxes, invest in public health or tighten seat-belt regulations, among other policies, an examination by The Washington Post found. States’ politics — and their resulting policies — are shaving years off American lives.

Ashtabula, Ohio’s problems stand out compared with two nearby counties — Erie, Pa., and Chautauqua, N.Y. All three communities, which ring picturesque Lake Erie and are a short drive from each other, have struggled economically in recent decades as industrial jobs withered — conditions that contribute toward rising midlife mortality, research shows. None is a success story when it comes to health. But Ashtabula residents are much more likely to die young, especially from smoking, diabetes-related complications or motor vehicle accidents, than people living in its sister counties in Pennsylvania and New York, states that have adopted more stringent public health measures.

That pattern held true during the coronavirus pandemic, when Ashtabula residents died of covid at far higher rates than people in Chautauqua and Erie.

The differences around Lake Erie reflect a steady national shift in how public health decisions are being made and who’s making them.

State lawmakers gained autonomy over how to spend federal safety net dollars following Republican President Ronald Reagan’s push to empower the states in the 1980s. Those investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped. Today, people in the South and Midwest, regions largely controlled by Republican state legislators, have increasingly higher chances of dying prematurely compared with those in the more Democratic Northeast and West, according to The Post’s analysis of death rates.

The differences in state policies directly correlate to those years lost, said Jennifer Karas Montez, director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies at Syracuse University and author of several papers that describe the connection between politics and life expectancy.

Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.

Like other hard-hit Midwestern counties, Ashtabula has seen a rise in what are known as “deaths of despair” — drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicides — prompting federal and state attention in recent years. But here, as well as in most counties across the United States, those types of deaths are far outnumbered by deaths caused by cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking-related cancers and other health issues for residents between 35 and 64 years old, The Post found. Between 2015 and 2019, nearly five times as many Ashtabula residents in their prime died of chronic medical conditions as died of overdoses, suicide and all other external causes combined, according to The Post analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death records.

Public health officials say Ohio could save lives by adopting measures such as a higher tobacco tax or stricter seat-belt rules, initiatives supported by Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican generally friendly to their cause.

“I told the legislature, ‘I’m going to ask you to invest in things where you’re not going to see the results during your term in office and I’m not going to see it during my term in office,’” DeWine said in an interview in the governor’s mansion.

But those proposals have repeatedly stalled in a state legislature controlled by Republicans for 27 of the past 29 years and whose leaders show little inclination to move aggressively now.

DeWine has a “nanny state” mentality, said Ohio state Rep. Bill Seitz, the state House majority floor leader and fellow Republican who has helped block tobacco tax increases amid aggressive lobbying by industry interests. The 68-year-old Seitz, who smoked for 50 years before developing kidney cancer and having a kidney removed this summer, said he’s unmoved by his own brush with the health system — even if it led him to finally kick the habit.

“I’m not going to turn into a smoke Nazi just because I used to smoke and I don’t anymore,” Seitz said.

 

When I say that Republicans would kill their own constituents if it meant "owning the libs" this is what I mean.  All my life America has been a country where the chief factor in your life expectancy has been the zip code where you grew up. Republicans are just making it worse for entire states.

They're literally killing us, folks.

Last Call For Supreme Crooks, Cads, And Creeps, Con't

With the latest Supreme Court term starting next month, the Roberts Court has agreed to take up multiple cases that could change the face of the internet, government regulation, voting rights, gun safety, and more.

 

The Supreme Court said Friday it would wade into the future of free speech online and decide whether laws passed in Texas and Florida can restrict social media companies from removing certain political posts or accounts.

The justices’ decision to take the landmark social media cases came in an order that also added 10 other cases to the calendar for the Supreme Court term that begins Monday. The additional cases concern the FBI’s “no-fly” list, individual property rights and the ability of criminal defendants to confront witnesses against them.

Earlier this year, the high court had said it would tackle controversial issues in the coming term involving gun regulations, voting rights and the power of federal agencies. Those cases will be heard as the justices face intense pressure from Democratic lawmakers to address ethics issues confronting some of their colleagues, including potential conflicts in some of the cases.

Tech industry groups, whose members include Facebook and Google’s YouTube, asked the court to block Texas and Florida laws passed in 2021 that regulate companies’ content-moderation policies. The companies say the measures are unconstitutional and conflict with the First Amendment by stripping private companies of the right to choose what to publish on their platforms.

The court’s review of those laws will be the highest-profile examination to date of allegations that Silicon Valley companies are illegally censoring conservative viewpoints. Those accusations reached a fever pitch when Facebook, Twitter and other companies suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The justices’ ruling could have significant implications for the future of democracy and elections, as Americans increasingly rely on social media to read and discuss political news. It could also have wide-ranging effects for policymakers in Congress and statehouses around the country as they attempt to craft new laws governing social media and misinformation. 

 

Needless to say, a ruling that finds that private tech and social media companies unable to moderate the content on their own platforms would be the end of those platforms as we know it, along with a ruling I have long warned about that would bring the end of executive agencies and their regulatory powers on everything else.

Having both of these go the GOP's way would dismantle much of the day-to-day infrastructure of America both physically and online, which is the point.

In preparation for a second Trump term, it would be the end of American democracy.

And that's if only those two rulings go to the conservatives. More would be coming.

In A Family Way

Gallup polling finds that the percentage of Americans who define the "ideal family" to have three or more children to be the highest in my lifetime.

Americans are about evenly divided in their views of whether smaller versus larger families are preferable. When asked about the ideal number of children for a family to have, a 44% plurality of U.S. adults think having two children is best, and 3% say a single child is ideal, totaling a 47% preference for smaller families.

At the same time, 45% of Americans favor larger families, including 29% who say having three children is ideal, 12% who think four is best, and 2% each who prefer having five or six or more children.

Just 2% think the ideal family does not include any children at all.

These findings, from aggregated Gallup polls in June and July 2023, translate to an average of 2.7 children considered ideal.

Gallup began periodically measuring Americans’ preferred family size in 1936 and found 64% favoring at least three children at that time. Support for larger families of three or more children peaked at 77% in 1945, at the end of World War II and just before the baby boom -- yet a minimum of 61% of U.S. adults favored families of at least three children through 1967. At the highest point during the baby boom, the average number of children per U.S. family was 3.6.

Between 1967 and 1971, preferences for larger families plummeted from 70% to 52%. This drop was likely fueled at least in part by concerns about a global population explosion, resulting from the 1968 bestselling book entitled The Population Bomb. Additionally, changes in societal norms -- such as women’s increased role in the workplace, a growing acceptance of premarital sex and economic concerns -- could have affected views.

In 1973, Americans’ preference for smaller families of one or two children became the standard, often significantly outpacing a desire for larger families of three or more children in the years that followed. These preferences were evident in U.S. birth rates, as the average number of children per family in the U.S. dropped to 1.8 by 1980 -- half of what it was at the peak of the baby boom.

After climbing to 64% in 1986, Americans’ preference for smaller families trended downward, but with more notable spikes in times of economic turmoil, including 57% in 2011 after the Great Recession. Conversely, amid stronger economic times, such as in 1997 and 2018, the gap between preferences for smaller and larger families narrowed.

Americans’ belief that the ideal family size includes three or more children has been rising steadily in recent years, currently up four percentage points from the previous reading in 2018 to its highest point since 1971. The latest measure is one of the few instances when preferences for smaller families (of one or two children) and larger families (of three or more children) are statistically tied in Gallup’s trend.

 

The reality of course is that having kids now is wildly expensive, to the point where a significant number of US parents define an ideal family to have fewer children than they currently, actually have.

U.S. adults’ views of the best family size have not always tracked with birth rates in the U.S., particularly in recent years. Since the Great Recession, Americans have been increasingly likely to say larger families are preferable, but birth rates in the U.S. have been declining. This suggests that while they may see larger families as ideal, other factors are preventing them from implementing this in their own lives.

In all, 31% of U.S. adults report that they have not had any children, while 14% have had one child, 28% have had two, 15% have had three, 7% have had four and 5% have had five or more.

A 48% plurality of those without children and a slim 51% majority of parents of one each see having two children as ideal.

The ideal for parents of two and three children generally conforms with what they have, as 54% of parents of two and a 46% plurality of parents of three say their own family situation is best. Those with four or more children are most inclined to favor larger families (43% say four or more children is ideal), yet slightly more of these parents, 49%, say between one and three children is ideal.

 

I don't have any kids, but grew up with three brothers and sisters. I have plenty of nieces and nephews, heck, one niece has a son of her own, meaning one of my younger brothers is a grandpa already.

 

It takes all kinds of families these days. For me, it's a found family of friends I've made through blogging, gaming, and being online in general.

 

Kids are still expensive though. Quarter-mil over 18 years last time I checked to raise one.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

As the latest variant of Covid ravages the country this fall, more Americans than ever have given up on vaccines and boosters, and the Biden administration has quietly folded efforts to fight vaccine disinformation after being blocked by Republicans in Congress and by the Supreme Court on what they can actually accomplish.

 

A Biden administration that vowed to restore Americans’ faith in public health has grown increasingly paralyzed over how to combat the resurgence in vaccine skepticism.

And internally, aides and advisers concede there is no comprehensive plan for countering a movement that’s steadily expanded its influence on the president’s watch.

The rising appeal of anti-vaccine activism has been underscored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s insurgent presidential campaign and fueled by prominent factions of the GOP. The mainstreaming of a once-fringe movement has horrified federal health officials, who blame it for seeding dangerous conspiracy theories and bolstering a Covid-era backlash to the nation’s broader public health practices.

But as President Joe Biden ramps up a reelection campaign centered on his vision for a post-pandemic America, there’s little interest among his aides in courting a high-profile vaccine fight — and even less certainty of how to win.

“There’s a real challenge here,” said one senior official who’s worked on the Covid response and was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But they keep just hoping it’ll go away.”

The White House’s reticence is compounded by legal and practical concerns that have cut off key avenues for repelling the anti-vaccine movement, according to interviews with eight current and former administration officials and others close to the process.

Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online. In addition, Congress is clawing back Covid funds once earmarked for vaccine education and outreach. And Biden himself has opted to largely ignore Kennedy’s campaign, concluding there’s no political benefit to engaging with the increasingly longshot challenger or his conspiratorial views.

The approach has given conservative influencers and lawmakers who have embraced Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics more space to promote their views and tout themselves as free speech warriors doing battle against the Biden administration.

And the impact is clear: As another Covid vaccination campaign gets underway, fewer Americans than ever have kept up to date on their shots. Child vaccination rates against the flu are measurably lower than before the pandemic. Even standard childhood inoculations to prevent diseases like the measles are subject to deepening partisan divisions, with recent polling showing Republicans are now more than twice as likely to believe the shots should be optional than they did in 2019. Democrats, by contrast, remain overwhelmingly in favor of childhood vaccine requirements.

“We can see a long-term future where kids aren’t going to get vaccinated in schools, diseases that we once thought had ended will roar back and kids will get sick and die from 100 percent preventable conditions,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health professor who has advised the White House. “This will cost lives in the long term.”

 

Science won many battles over the last three years, but the anti-vaxxers have all but won the war politically, and it's going to cost thousands upon thousands of preventable deaths in the years ahead.

I don't know how we fix this, either. The Roberts Court has made it clear that the government can't mandate vaccinations, and corporations can't require them for employment. Increasingly, schools are being blocked from requiring them for attendance as entire school districts are getting sick and schools having to shut down because of lack of healthy staff or students.

Hospitalizations are up as I pointed out at the top of the post, and we're in as bad of a situation as we were in 2020, only we have the vaccines ready and much fewer people are using them.

Please get the latest booster. Trust me when I say you never know what's around the corner in life...or death.

A Bunch Of Block Heads, Con't

Social media outlets don't want to piss off Republicans in any way, so they're now specifically targeting Democratic, liberal topics, outlets, and constituencies. First up: Elongated Muskrat is specifically blocking NY Times articles.

 

X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times.

Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X.

The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets.

“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.

 

Indeed, article engagement by X posters has dropped by 90% over the last six weeks.  Oh, and before we think that Zuckerbot and his Facebook/Threads/Instagram empire are the good guys, well, they're not.

Instagram’s text-based social platform Threads last week rolled out its new search function, a crucial step toward the platform’s expansion and one that would give it more parity with X, formerly known as Twitter.

Not even 24 hours later, the company was embroiled in controversy. When users went to Threads to search for content related to “covid” and “long covid,” they were met with a blank screen that showed no search results and a pop-up linking to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.

“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”

Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day. “I was excited by search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in covid, I came up with no search results.”

Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick. Hospitalizations jumped nearly 16 percent in the United States last week and have been rising steadily since July, according to CDC data, though they remain less than what they were for the comparable week a year ago. Deaths are less than a quarter of what they were year to year, CDC statistics show. 

 

Yes, that's right, Covid is just as bad as porn and gets blocked by Threads in searches. Americans will just have to go to independent social media like TikTok to search for...never mind. 

TIKTOK HAS FIXED a mistake that temporarily prevented users from searching for videos related to the Writers Guild of America strike — saying the phrase was accidentally flagged by the app’s filters against QAnon.

News of the block was first reported by Media Matters. When the phrase WGA was put into the search bar, viewers were instead shown a warning that the search “may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines.” The hashtag WGA also did not bring up any videos.

A spokesperson for TikTok told Rolling Stone on Monday that the search term was inadvertently blocked as part of existing protections against QAnon conspiracy theories, which violate community guidelines against disinformation. In 2020, the app banned several large hashtags related to the conspiracy theory and told Rolling Stone in a statement that the company would be developing a way to make QAnon-related content harder to find with TikTok’s search function.

The spokesperson also noted that searching WGA fully written out as Writers Guild strike or “Writers’ Guild of America” would show related videos.

 

Just a mistake, you see. Until they got caught.

 

Blockheads, all of them.

Last Call For Socially Acceptable

The 5th Circuit has ruled that while the Biden Administration can continue to remain in contact with social media companies, overturning a lower court's decision in part, it still found that the White House most likely violated the First Amendment rights of social media companies by coercing them to take down social media disinformation posts about COVID vaccination and The Big Lie on 2020 election fraud, even though they were falsehoods.

 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Friday ruled that the Biden White House, top government health officials and the FBI likely violated the First Amendment by improperly influencing tech companies’ decisions to remove or suppress posts on the coronavirus and elections.

The decision was likely to be seen as victory for conservatives who’ve long argued that social media platforms’ content moderation efforts restrict their free speech rights. But some advocates also said the ruling was an improvement over a temporary injunction U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty issued July 4.

David Greene, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the new injunction was “a thousand times better” than what Doughty, an appointee of former president Trump, had ordered originally.

Doughty’s decision had affected a wide range of government departments and agencies, and imposed 10 specific prohibitions on government officials. The appeals court threw out nine of those and modified the 10th to limit it to efforts to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

The 5th Circuit panel also limited the government institutions affected by its ruling to the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI. It removed restrictions Doughty had imposed on the departments of State, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services and on agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The 5th Circuit found that those agencies had not coerced the social media companies to moderate their sites.

Read the 5th Circuit's ruling

The judges wrote that the White House likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” They also found the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the Justice Department was “reviewing” the decision and evaluating its options.

“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the White House official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”

The decision is likely to have a wide-ranging impact on how the federal government communicates with the public and the social media companies about key public health issues and the 2024 elections.

The case is the most successful salvo to date in a growing conservative legal and political effort to limit coordination between the federal government and tech platforms. This case and recent probes in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have accused government officials of actively colluding with platforms to influence public discourse, in an evolution of long-running allegations that liberal employees inside tech companies favor Democrats when making decisions about what posts are removed or limited online.

The appeals court judges found that pressure from the White House and the CDC affected how social media platforms handled posts about covid-19 in 2021, as the Biden administration sought to encourage the public to obtain vaccinations.

The judges detail multiple emails and statements from White House officials that they say show escalating threats and pressure on the social media companies to address covid misinformation. The judges say that the officials “were not shy in their requests,” calling for posts to be removed “ASAP” and appearing “persistent and angry.” The judges detailed a particularly contentious period in July of 2021, which reached a boiling point when President Biden accused Facebook of “killing people.”

“We find, like the district court, that the officials’ communications — reading them in ‘context, not in isolation’ — were on-the-whole intimidating,” the judges wrote.

 

What this means is that the White House's plans to patrol social media for disinformation campaigns by foreign actors is reduced to ashes, and that it's not like Twitter or Facebook were going to cooperate anyway.  

 

Besides, the Roberts Court will almost certainly side with Republicans here, it's just a matter of how pervasive the court order is. I don't expect the executive branch to be cut off from any contact with social media companies whatsoever as with Judge Doughty's initial ruling, but a SCOTUS precedent that forbids any state or federal moderation of social media content is right in line with what Justices Alito or Thomas would do.

Also, the ruling all but begs the Biden administration to appeal this directly to the Supreme Court, giving the administration until a week from Monday to do so before the order takes effect. An internet freed from any regulations and responsibilities would be a tremendous weapon for the right-wing ghouls and trolls to unleash upon the rest of us.

Regardless,expect your social media feeds to be flooded by targeted political ads and far worse in the next 14 months.

The Revelation Will Be Televised

Fulton County, Georgia Judge Scott McAfee is confirming that like nearly all legal proceedings in the county, the case against Donald Trump will be televised and steamed on the internet.

 

A Fulton County judge on Thursday said that all court proceedings in the election interference case against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants will be live streamed and televised.

Judge Scott McAfee also said he is following the precedent set by fellow Fulton Judge Robert McBurney; all hearings and trials will be broadcast on the Fulton County Court YouTube channel.

In an order issued Thursday, McAfee said members of the media would be allowed to use computers and cellphones inside the courtroom for non-recording purposes during court proceedings. There will be pool coverage for television, radio and still photography.

The proceedings — especially those involving Trump himself — are expected to attract international attention.

The transparency in the county court stands in stark contrast to federal court. In Monday’s hearing on whether White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows should have his case transferred to U.S. District Court, journalists were barred from bringing cell phones, laptops and cameras into the Richard B. Russell federal building.

 

I think it's well within a national interest perspective to televise and stream Trump's federal cases too, but hey, I'm just a US citizen, what do I know.

 

But man, I can't wait to see Trump sweating at the defense table, knowing he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Going Viral In Kentucky, Con't

Welcome back to school here in Kentucky, kids. You may think Covid is over. Covid doesn't think it's over with you.

Two school districts in eastern Kentucky have canceled in-person classes this week after a rise in illnesses including Covid-19, respiratory viruses and strep among its students and staff, according to local officials.

The Lee County School District, which enrolls just under 900 students, reported an 82% decrease in attendance last Friday, which it attributed to illnesses including flu and colds, Superintendent Earl Ray Shuler said. 

Lee County started the school year on August 8. By Monday of this week, the attendance rate had dropped to 81%, with 14 staff members also out sick, Shuler said.

Shuler said all buildings and buses are being sanitized, and all student activities for the remainder of the week are canceled.

Classwork will be done remotely for the remainder of the week. In-person learning returns Monday.

Students who had Covid-19 will be required to wear masks for five days when students return to school, Shuler said.

Magoffin County Schools, which has approximately 1,800 students, has seen its student attendance plummet from 95% last week to 83% on Wednesday, Magoffin County Schools Superintendent Chris Meadows told CNN by phone.

Meadows said the district made the decision Wednesday to cancel classes for the remainder of the week and will have students return to school Monday.

“We just kept seeing a trend,” Meadows said. “It’s not an easy decision, I don’t like to close school.”

 

A not-so-gentle reminder that the pandemic is still very much with us, and with one out of every five kids sick already in some districts, it's only going to get worse once we hit the heart of flu and Covid season later this fall. 

Believe it, from the guy who's taking care of loads of leave of absence tickets at your local enterprise IT desk because HR forces you on to short-term leave if you're out sick more than 3 straight days. Those tickets are way up too since school started, with snotty little kids bringing diseases to and from the local petri dish with 35 kids stuffed in a classroom and getting mom and dad sick.

It's going to be a bad winter.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

After being admonished by US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan over his social media threats on Friday, Donald Trump has learned precisely nothing and made more threats late Sunday night.

 

Former President Donald Trump launched a post-midnight attack Monday on the judge handling the case charging him with seeking to steal the 2020 election, despite a warning from the court late last week against "inflammatory statements."

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan "obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!" Trump said in a Truth Social post just after 1 a.m.

Trump, who also protested an expected indictment in Atlanta in statements over the weekend, cited Chutkan's comments during the sentencing of a person convicted for participating in the insurrection attempt of Jan. 6, 2021.

Noting that the people who mobbed the Capitol that day wore caps and carried flags with the name of one man, Trump, Chutkan said in October 2022: "It's blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”

Chutkan, who has been assigned the case that accuses Trump of conspiring to steal the 2020 election from President Joe Biden, issued a protective order Friday restricting what Trump can say publicly about the evidence against him.

The federal judge is known for imposing stiff sentences on the individuals who participated in the Capitol riot, but veteran federal court watchers told USA TODAY that she is a consummate professional who will handle a sensitive case with the utmost care.

 

Trump seems to think he's going to win this fight, turning up the heat until Chutkan is forced to act and to make him a martyr before the trial can even start, something he figures will help him on appeal if nothing else. It's a calculated move, with Trump's calculations strongly favoring the fact that he's never really been dealt any consequences for his long career of criminal nonsense.

So far, Trump's been right.

We'll see.

 

Indepen-Dunce Week: Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem

A January 6th terrorist drove to the Obama residence with a pile of guns and ammo after Trump basically doxxed the Obamas and this is basically straight-up scary now.

 

Former President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform what he claimed was the home address of former President Barack Obama on the same day that a man with guns in his van was arrested near the property, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in revealing new details about the case.

Taylor Taranto, 37, who prosecutors say participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, kept two firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition inside a van he had driven cross-country and had been living in, according to a Justice Department motion that seeks to keep him behind bars.

On the day of his June 29 arrest, prosecutors said, Taranto reposted a Truth Social post from Trump containing what Trump claimed was Obama’s home address. In a post on Telegram, Taranto wrote: “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s.” That’s a reference to John Podesta, the former chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign.

Taranto also told followers on his YouTube live stream that he was looking to get a “good angle on a shot.”

A federal defender representing Taranto did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

His wife told investigators that he had come to Washington this time because of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's offer earlier this year to produce unseen video of the Jan. 6 attack, the federal detention memo states. Taranto already faces four misdemeanor counts related to the Capitol assault, when prosecutors say he joined the crush of rioters who broke into the building and made his way to the entrance of the Speaker's Lobby outside the House chamber.

Since then, prosecutors say, Taranto has been active online, posting a Facebook video of himself in the Capitol that day and endorsing a conspiracy theory that the death of Ashli Babbitt — who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she began to climb through the broken part of a door leading into the Speaker's Lobby — was a hoax.

The FBI had been monitoring Taranto's online activities because of his involvement in the riot, and began searching for him last Wednesday after he asserted on his YouTube livestream that he was in Gaithersburg, Maryland on a “one-way mission” and intended to blow up the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The following day, he continued his live stream from the Washington neighborhood where Obama lives — an area heavily monitored by the U.S. Secret Service — and said that he was looking for “entrance points” and wanted to get a “good angle on a shot,” according to the Justice Department’s detention memo. Officials said he was spotted by law enforcement a few blocks from the former president’s home and fled, though he was chased by Secret Service officers.

 

The Secret Service stepped in and collared this asshole, and I'm extremely glad that they did. But the bigger issue is that Trump implied violence against the Obamas, and that violence almost happened. Trump can't be convicted and jailed quickly enough, because he's still an existential threat to America.