James.galbraith

Todd Haselton from CNBC reviews Apple Fitness+, with some thoughts on how it compares with Peloton's similar app. Here's an excerpt from his report: Apple's subscription fitness app, Fitness+, launches Monday. I've been using it for the past several days and I think it offers a nice variety of workouts that people will like. You need an Apple Watch to take the prerecorded exercise classes, which are available on iPhones, iPads and the Apple TV. It's a smart way for Apple to make the Apple Watch even stickier. If people get really into the fitness classes, like I have, it will be yet another way Apple keeps people locked in to its ecosystem of products. Why buy another phone, tablet or watch if you really like Fitness+? It also comes at a great time, when people aren't in gyms and are at home looking for ways to exercise. Like other fitness apps, including Peloton's, which starts at $12.99 a month for classes that don't need the company's connected spin bike, you don't need anything to use it. But, you'll get more out of it if you have any indoor cycle, treadmill, rowing machine or free weights, since some of the classes require equipment. But you don't need anything special. I've been riding a hand-me-down exercise bike, for example. Fitness+ costs $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. It's also part of the Premier Apple One plan, which costs $29.95 per month, and includes other Apple products like Apple Music, Apple TV+ and extra iCloud storage bundled together at a discount.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration is a swamp. The great con that Trump was able to to perpetrate on the Americans who voted for him was that his political outsider credentials—which were and remain real—would allow him to clean up the big money corruption developed and fostered predominantly by the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. The reality has been that not only has Trump further swampified the government, he’s also brought in new con men and women into the government—or more realistically, brought around the government to leech off of. These are people like Mike Lindell and David Harris. Lindell you might remember as the MyPillow guy who sort of makes up a lot of right-wing media advertising dollars. He’s a shameless mad hatter pushing unproven COVID-19 remedies and alien-level conspiracy theories about the election.

David Harris is a lesser known former vitamin huckster who rebranded himself as a Black conservative and received a big boost from Trump in popularity. His angle is that he’s conservative and he’s Black and there’s a financial niche market to be found in super racist right-wing circles if you can serve the purpose of making right-wingers feel less racist than they are. Harris was highlighted as one of the top “superspreaders” of Trump’s false election misinformation by The New York Times in the weeks after Election Day. On Sunday, Harris was in Washington, D.C. for one of the “Stop The Steal” Trump rallies of people trying to overthrow the U.S. government. He spoke on stage in front of others, like the Mike “MyPillow” Lindell. It turns out that before Harris went into his speech, which mostly consisted of a long-winded recitation of a Bible passage, he had some shilling to do.

One of the people helping to fund these rallies is Lindell, and Harris wanted to make sure the audience gave Lindell the applause and recognition he deserves; being a scumbag who wants to overthrow the government takes money and time and conning. Before Lindell went up to bluster away relatively incoherently about how all of the Biden votes are proof that Donald Trump has more votes (yes, that was the basic statement by MyPillow man on Sunday), Harris had some business to do for what we call in the entertainment business the money.:

DAVID HARRIS: A special thank you to the cosponsor that really helped fund a lot of this. Mr. MyPillow himself, Mike Lindell! Amazing patriot, loves this country, loves us, loves the president, and the president loves him. And I gotta tell you I love his codes, right? I love his pillows, I love his sheets, I love his mattress topper, and I love his codes because you know what, the Kraken has been released. You are a part of the Kraken. So for the best deals to support this patriot, use the code “Kraken” at mypillow.com. He does not talk about a lot of what goes through behind the scenes, but he goes through a lot of hell for standing up for us.

It’s very important to note here how Harris began by saying, “And I gotta tell you I love his codes, right?” before remembering that he needed to do the whole make sure to mention the things Lindell sells (i.e., sheets and bed toppers), and then mention the codes. It’s one of the things you learn doing live readings for ads. There are a few things you need to hit and if you nail it, you make it seem like you aren’t doing an ad. Usually you just have to remember to mention all of the things in the right order. Harris does a fine job selling that MyPillow merch. We are just weeks away from their discount promotional codes going from “Kraken” to things like “IAMASucker” and “PleaseTakeMyMoney.”

After the day’s events, Proud Boys and other racists from the day’s “peaceful protests” went on to enact seemingly state-sanctioned violence against Americans who are interested in protecting our democracy from ethno-state insurgents and domestic terrorists like Trump and friends.

The two biggest stories of 2020 in the U.S. — the pandemic and the election — are finding some closure today, though each is really just entering its next phase. The conflicts and challenges presented by both the pandemic and President Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results are not over. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, the crew discusses how we got to this moment and what comes next.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Via tweet—of course—Donald Trump has just announced the resignation of Attorney General William Barr, who will be leaving his post as of December 23rd. Trump also posted Barr's hilariously fawning letter, which conspicuously does not mention whether he was asked to leave or did so of his own accord, only noting that he will be wrapping up matters over the next week "as discussed."

Trump was widely reported to be angry with Barr over Barr's inability to nullify the election on his behalf based on conspiracy theories and autocratic nonsense, and rumors of his possible firing had been circulating for weeks.

Trump posted Barr's ousting to Twitter only minutes after California's 55 electors officially gave Joe Biden the Electoral College win and the next presidency of the United States. This was likely a pathetic Trumpian effort to deflect attention from Biden's win, though we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Barr's job really did hinge on a last-ditch effort to prevent Trump's election loss from being so formalized.

Trump's senior adviser insists that the effort to overturn the election will succeed.

Conservatives may not care whether the Cleveland Indians change their name, but if it's a victory for liberals, that's a problem.

Cyberpunk 2077 is here in all its glory and pain. On some machines, it's a visual spectacle pushing the limits of current technology and delivering on the promise of Deus Ex, but open world. On other machines, including last-gen consoles, it's a unoptimized and barely playable nightmare. Developer CD Projekt Red has said it's working to improve the game, but fans already have a number of fixes, particularly if you're using an AMD CPU. From a report: Fans aren't waiting for the developer however and over the weekend AMD CPU users discovered that a few small tweaks could improve performance on their PCs. Some players reported performance gains of as much as 60 percent. Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be a CPU intensive game and, at release, it isn't properly optimized for AMD chips. "If you run the game on an AMD CPU and check your usage in task manager, it seems to utilise 4 (logical, 2 physical) cores in frequent bursts up to 100% usage, whereas the rest of the physical cores sit around 40-60%, and their logical counterparts remain idle," Redditor BramblexD explained in a post on the /r/AMD subreddit. Basically, Cyberpunk 2077 is only utilizing a portion of any AMD chips power. Digital Foundry, a YouTube channel that does in-depth technical analysis of video games, noticed the AMD issue as well. "It really looks like Cyberpunk is not properly using the hyperthreads on Ryzen CPUs," Digital Foundry said in a recent video. To fix this issue, the community has developed three separate solutions. One involves altering the game's executable with a hex editor, the other involves editing a config file, and a third is an unofficial patch built by the community. All three do the same thing -- unleash the power of AMDs processors. "Holy shit are you a wizard or something? The game is finally playable now!" One redditor said of the hex editing technique. "With this tweak my CPU usage went from 50% to ~75% and my frametime is so much more stable now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Immigration authorities have expelled another 67 children on public health grounds since the November court ruling.

The Trump administration has expelled at least 67 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived on the US-Mexico border since November 18, continuing to invoke Covid-19 as a rationale in defiance of a court order.

US District Judge Emmet Sullivan blocked the administration on November 18 from turning unaccompanied migrant children away on the basis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health restrictions. President Donald Trump has used those restrictions to shut the door on virtually all asylum seekers arriving on the southern border, largely replacing other policy barriers he implemented prior to the pandemic.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement put 33 unaccompanied children on a flight to Guatemala on the day Sullivan issued the decision and decided not to bring them back to the US, BuzzFeed reported at the time. And on Saturday, the Justice Department admitted in a filing in Washington federal court that the administration had expelled 34 additional unaccompanied children in “contravention” of Sullivan’s ruling, saying that officials had “already begun taking steps to remedy those actions as well as to avoid future expulsions.”

Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott said in a court filing Saturday that his agents had encountered more than 3,700 unaccompanied children from November 18 to December 10 who were processed in compliance with the court order and resulting agency guidance. But 26 children — ages 14 to 17 years old and mostly arriving in the Rio Grande Valley — had also been expelled. Nine of the children later tried to reenter and were processed in accordance with the court order.

He said that his office has since reiterated the agency guidance to all of its field offices and sector chiefs and has contacted Mexican authorities in order to locate the affected children, but has not had success so far. He cited in-person training challenges due to the pandemic and said that “formal discipline is being actively considered” for the officials responsible, who were apparently “unaware of the guidance.”

William Ferrara, a senior field operations official at US Customs and Border Protection, also reported in a court filing Saturday that his office had expelled eight unaccompanied children, ages 12 to 17, including one who was expelled a second time upon trying to reenter the US. The officers responsible had claimed that the children had “made a wrong turn and had no intention of entering the United States” or were unable to prove their identity or immigration status, he said.

Trump has used the CDC restrictions to turn away thousands of migrants

The Trump administration began expelling migrants to Mexico in March under Title 42, a section of the Public Health Safety Act, that allows the US government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering the US “when doing so is required in the interest of public health.” It resulted in the expulsions of more than 250,000 people from March through October and remains effective until the CDC director determines that the further spread of Covid-19 has “ceased to be a serious danger to public health.”

By the time Sullivan prevented the administration from expelling unaccompanied children under the policy, at least 13,000 such children had already been deported, often with little if any notice to their parents or legal counsel and even if they showed no symptoms of the virus. Others had been held in hotels along the border for extended periods under the program.

President-elect Joe Biden has left open the possibility of maintaining the Title 42 program at least temporarily. But it’s not clear that there remains a legitimate public health rationale for keeping the policy in place, given that the level of community transmission inside the US is already so high.

Immigrant advocates have argued that the US can continue to protect vulnerable immigrants without adverse consequences to public health. Jennifer Podkul, the vice president of policy and advocacy at the legal aid group Kids in Need of Defense, said in a press call that the administration could at least create exceptions for particularly vulnerable classes of migrants.

Still, the Biden administration might be weighing whether to maintain the Title 42 program as a means of stemming migration temporarily at a time when many Americans support such restrictions. An August NPR/Ipsos poll found that 58 percent of Americans support “banning the entry of asylum seekers and refugees into the US” to curb the spread of Covid-19.

“They’re coming into office in January. It’s highly likely that Covid conditions will continue to be in an emergency state,” Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who served as an immigration official under the Clinton administration, said in a press call. “So it is possible that we would see a new administration maintain the CDC guidance at the border, at least for some period of time, which would also then gain some time for putting changes into place that allow for a more functional system for granting asylum.”

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Once he has monopoly power, fresh lemons may as well not exist.

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[A new battle in America's culture wars]

Late last month, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court blocked enforcement of New York's restrictions on religious gatherings during the Covid epidemic. (Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo). The Court ruled in the context of a preliminary injunction, which means that the case returns to the lower courts for a final decision. Meanwhile, cert is pending in two similar cases, one from California and one from Nevada, both of which are back at the Court after earlier consideration this past summer.

Covid restrictions vary from state to state and are continuously being updated to account for the course of the epidemic. As a result, the decisions in these cases are typically quite narrow. Yet the cases have generated a tremendous amount of heat. The epidemic, which at this writing has killed almost 300,000 Americans, has exacerbated America's cultural and political polarization. The epidemic has become another battle in our wars over "science" and "religion," "equality" and "freedom." Justice Kavanaugh put it well in a case from Nevada this past summer:

"The definitional battles over what constitutes favoritism, discrimination, equality, or neutrality can influence, if not decide, the outcomes of religion cases. But the parties to religion cases and the judges deciding those cases often do not share a common vocabulary or common background principles. And that disconnect can muddy the analysis, build resentment, and lead to litigants and judges talking past one another."

In our latest Legal Spirits podcast, my colleague Marc DeGirolami and I discuss the Court's most decision in the Brooklyn litigation and its implications for similar cases and for our culture wars generally. You can listen to the episode here.

Black theological experts are troubled by Republican attacks against Rev. Warnock.

Over the course of the Georgia Senate campaign, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) has repeatedly referred to her Democratic opponent Rev. Raphael Warnock as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock.” She repeated the phrase 13 times in a recent debate ahead of the January 5 runoff.

“The Democrats want to fundamentally change America, and the agent of change is my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock,” Loeffler said during the debate, claiming that Warnock has attacked police and the American military “from the pulpit.”

Warnock is the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — the church Martin Luther King Jr. preached at in the 1960s. And Republicans have been using excerpts from Warnock’s own sermons to attack him.

This rhetoric carries a specific connotation, Black theological experts told Vox. It’s not just pointing out that Warnock is a Democrat running in a state that’s historically more conservative than the nation as a whole; it’s also negatively emphasizing the long tradition of activism and social justice in Southern Black churches.

In interviews with Vox, experts said this is not a particularly new tactic. Republicans used a similar playbook in 2008 when they attempted to tie former President Barack Obama to his former church pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Georgia Republicans also ran an ad linking Warnock to Wright, which Politifact rated mostly false).

“Particularly in Georgia, which is struggling between the old South and the new South, Black religion has always been thought of as being potentially a very dangerous political force,” Rev. Stephen Ray, the president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, told Vox. “I don’t think you can talk about the weaponization of Rev. Warnock’s sermons apart from that.”

The runoff elections are all about which party can turn out more of their base, so Republicans are branding Warnock “radical” and “dangerous” with a clear goal: To motivate the GOP’s conservative base to turn out on January 5.

While Republicans lost the presidency in the 2020 election, they had success in many House and Senate races by launching this kind of attack on Democratic candidates — tying even moderate candidates to socialism and activist-led calls to defund the police (something Warnock and fellow Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff have repeatedly said they’re against).

With control in the Senate hanging in the balance in the two Georgia runoffs, Republicans plan to keep hammering that messaging home.

“Fear will motivate much more strongly than any other emotion in the runoff,” Republican consultant Brian Robinson told Vox recently. “Republican [voters] are aggrieved, many have listened to the president’s messaging on the election, and they’re scared of a Democratic Senate joining Pelosi and Biden.”

Republican attacks against Warnock, briefly explained

As the Senate race enters its final three weeks, Republicans are launching a volley of negative attacks on Warnock in particular. Warnock has enjoyed a relatively easy campaign up until now, with Loeffler fending off a challenge from Republican Rep. Doug Collins on November 3. Polling showed Warnock entered the runoff with relatively high likability numbers.

In particular, Republicans have been circulating a clip from a 2011 sermon where Warnock said, “America, nobody can serve God and the military,” as he quoted Bible scripture to make a larger point about faith and service to God coming before anything else. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who regularly quotes Bible scripture on his Twitter page, blasted Warnock’s sermon in a tweet last month.

Warnock’s longer quote was, “America, nobody can serve God and the military. You can’t serve God and money. You can’t serve God and mammon at the same time. America, choose ye this day who you will serve.” In Biblical scripture, mammon refers to the corrupting influence of money and riches, and Warnock was in part quoting Matthew 6:24 from the Bible.

“The part I was most disappointed in was them taking sermons out of context to make that connection,” Justin Giboney, president of Christian civic engagement organization AND Campaign, told Vox. “This is supposed to be a group — when it comes to conservatives in Georgia — that has a certain level of respect for religion, for religious freedom, for what the pulpit means.”

A Warnock campaign spokesperson pushed back on Republican attacks in a statement to Vox, saying, “Kelly Loeffler’s dishonest attacks say a lot about Kelly Loeffler.”

“Just like he has since he got in this race, Reverend Warnock will continue to talk to Georgians about how he will work for them in the Senate, fighting for affordable health care, for fair wages and the dignity of working people. That’s the kind of Senator that Georgia needs,” campaign spokesperson Michael Brewer told Vox in a statement.

When Vox reached out to the Loeffler campaign for comment on whether the attacks against Warnock lacked the necessary context, a campaign spokesperson reiterated that “Georgians know how radical he is when they hear him.”

“For decades, Raphael Warnock has used his pulpit to oppose the 2nd Amendment, attack the police, condemn Israel, disparage the military, and embrace communists and Marxists alike,” Loeffler campaign spokesperson Stephen Lawson told Vox in a statement.

Some say Georgia Republicans are playing off heightened political polarization and “the politics of fear.”

“Fear that antifa and the socialist left is going to take over and gain control in certain areas,” said Giboney, who lives in Atlanta. “They’re doing their best to attach Rev. Warnock to that fear.”

Georgia will decide who controls the Senate, and Republicans have also been playing up a clip of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer talking about flipping Georgia’s Senate seats after Biden won the state, where he said, “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”

To add a dash of reality, even if Democrats manage to win both Georgia Senate seats, they will be at the barest of Senate majorities. The Senate would then be split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. Unless Democrats abolish the filibuster (something conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has unequivocally said no to), they’ll need 60 votes and vast Republican buy-in to pass most bills. In other words, winning Georgia does not give Democrats an unfettered ability to change the country.

“Anybody would agree that Chuck Schumer is a savvy political mind, but he was playing to his audience in New York and he handed Georgia Republicans a huge gift with that clip,” Robinson, the Republican strategist, told Vox recently. “He not only scared fervent Georgia Republicans; he scared independents with that kind of talk.”

Still, some think that Republicans painting Warnock as “radical” could backfire by potentially rallying the base of Black voters that Democrats need in order to win Georgia.

“The performance by Loeffler was so disconcerting ... that people really are mobilized in a way I hadn’t noticed before,” said Robert Franklin, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “You’re now insulting our most beloved and cherished institution — you’re insulting our faith.”

The Black church is rooted in social justice; white evangelical churches are about personal salvation

While the white Christian evangelical church is more concerned with personal salvation, the Black Christian church has a long tradition of pastors focusing on social and racial justice.

“At its best, it tries to hold the country to account on morality,” Anthony Pinn, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, told Vox. “Martin Luther King Jr. and others are from a long line of church leaders who understood themselves to have an important role beyond saving souls. They understood the church as having an obligation to demand justice.”

Several theological experts Vox spoke to agreed the significance of the Black church is that it is an institution wholly created by and for Black people. Words like “radical” have long been used to describe Black ministers, dating back much further than Martin Luther King Jr. Some see the GOP’s laser-like focus on Warnock as having a racial component as well; experts Vox interviewed said “radical” is a coded word.

“I would argue that what you see here is a continuation of an understanding of Black leadership and Black churches as a threat, that these institutions and these people threaten the system as it is,” said Pinn.

For instance, in the 1950s and ’60s, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover started monitoring King and went to great lengths to link him to the Communist movement (King was not a communist). A 1968 FBI document called him “a whole-hearted Marxist who has studied it (Marxism), believes in it and agrees with it, but because of his being a minister of religion, does not dare to espouse it publicly.”

Pinn and others added the current dialogue in Georgia can’t be separated from the context of the long struggle for racial justice in America. The existence of the Black church itself also cannot be separated from that struggle, as it is “the only institution in America that has been wholly controlled by Black people,” according to Ray.

If Warnock manages to win his race, he would bolster Black representation in the Senate (there are currently just three Black senators, which will fall to two with Vice President-elect Harris going to the White House).

“He would be the living embodiment of while it will be a hard fight, it will not be impossible,” Ray said.

Donald Trump denounced “cancel culture” following a report that Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team would drop “Indians” from its name.

The NYT reports: “Cleveland could announce its plans as soon as this week, according to the three people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. It is not immediately clear what Cleveland’s exact steps will be beyond dropping the Indians name. The transition to a new name involves many logistical considerations, including work with uniform manufacturers and companies that produce other team equipment and stadium signage.”

Tweeted Trump: “Oh no! What is going on? This is not good news, even for ‘Indians’. Cancel culture at work!”

Oh no! What is going on? This is not good news, even for “Indians”. Cancel culture at work! https://t.co/d1l0C9g6Pd

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2020

Cleveland.com reports: “Cleveland’s baseball team has been known as the Indians since the 1915 season, but has faced backlash from Native American groups and those who claim the use of the use of Indigenous mascots and imagery for sports teams is racist and demeaning. … Prior to the 2019 season, the club worked to phase out Native American imagery and logos at Progressive Field, including the retirement of its longtime Chief Wahoo logo that many considered troublesome.”

The post Trump Rages Over Report Cleveland’s Baseball Team Will Drop ‘Indians’ from Name appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

(310): I thought I was drunk because I kept grabbing his arm instead of his dick
(310): But then I realized it wasn’t his arm and that I was very lucky.

Kelly Loeffler’s campaign condemned a photo which surfaced over the weekend and shows the Georgia GOP senator posing with a well-known, longtime white supremacist.

ALERT: Kelly Loeffler just posed for a photo with Chester Doles, a former KKK leader who runs the white supremacist American Patriots USA.

In 1993, Doles nearly beat a Black man to death.

In 2017, he marched in Charlottesville.

This is who @KLoeffler is proudly appealing to. pic.twitter.com/4YZcvL05rf

— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) December 13, 2020

Said Stephen Lawson, Loeffler’s campaign spokesman in a statement to the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “Kelly had no idea who that was, and if she had she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for.”

Loeffler is in a competitive January runoff election with Democrat Raphael Warnock for her U.S. Senate seat which could sway the balance of power in that body.

The Hill reports: “The photo in question, which was taken at a campaign event Friday, depicts the senator smiling next to Chester Doles, a reported former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was sentenced to prison for the 1993 beating of a black man, according to The Baltimore Sun. The AJC reported that Doles also has ties to the Hammerskins, also known as Hammerskin Nation, defined as the “best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The post Kelly Loeffler ‘Had No Idea’ She Was Posing with KKK Leader, According to Campaign appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

"Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly have co-designed and proposed a new DNS standard to tackle ongoing privacy issues associated with DNS," reports ZDNet. Cloudflare calls it "a practical approach for improving privacy" that "aims to improve the overall adoption of encrypted DNS protocols without compromising performance and user experience..." Third-parties, such as ISPs, find it more difficult to trace website visits when DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is enabled. DoH deployment is on the cards for many major browser providers, although rollout plans are ongoing. Now, Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) has been proposed by Cloudflare — together with partners PCCW Global, Surf, and Equinix — to improve on these models by adding an additional layer of public key encryption and a network proxy... The overall aim of ODoH is to decouple client proxies from resolvers. A network proxy is inserted between clients and DoH servers — such as Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1's public DNS resolver — and the combination of both this and public key encryption "guarantees that only the user has access to both the DNS messages and their own IP address at the same time," according to Cloudflare... "The client behaves as it does in DNS and DoH, but differs by encrypting queries for the target, and decrypting the target's responses..." Test clients for the code have been provided to the open source community to encourage experimentation with the proposed standard. It can take years before support is enabled by vendors for new DNS standards, but Eric Rescorla, Firefox's CTO, has already indicated that Firefox will "experiment" with ODoH.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The balance of power in the Senate, along with how much Joe Biden can accomplish during his first term as president, will be determined solely by a two-race election in Georgia held on Jan. 5. Ironically, the Georgia law requiring a runoff race when no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote in the general election was specifically designed by racist lawmakers to disenfranchise the Black vote. The conventional thinking has always been that high turnout benefits Democrats while lower-turnout elections, like a runoff, help Republicans. While the GOP is a smaller group, its constituents are more likely to vote.

This ploy has worked in years past. In 1992, the last time a Democratic presidential candidate won Georgia, Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler Jr. ran six points ahead of Bill Clinton on Election Day. However, during the runoff, not enough Democratic voters showed up. Fowler Jr. wound up losing to his Republican opponent. For the runoff this January, however, this ridiculous law may benefit the Democrats for the first time. There is a real possibility that Democrats will win both seats—odds we simply didn’t have on Election Day. Besides the massive demographic shift and intense energy on our side, the GOP has devolved into a civil war between the pragmatists and the cultists. Their interests were aligned on Election Day, but no longer.

Donald Trump, intentionally or not, seems to be doing everything he can to sabotage the runoff election at a time when Republicans can ill afford to lose any voters. With the right-wing cult leader off the ballot, Democrats can and should exploit the civil war—and they are. Ironically, the bigots who designed the runoff just might have given Democrats the ability to elect Georgia’s first African American and Jewish senators.

Over 100 years ago, segregationists in Georgia feared that African American voters would vote as a bloc and potentially split the vote amongst the white candidates. A second election, however, could give fearful white voters another chance to unite behind the strongest white candidate. This was the thinking of segregationist Denmark Groover, who cooked up the scheme. Georgia House by Rep. James Mackay even quoted Groover on the statehouse floor, summarizing the reasoning behind the ploy: “the Negroes and the pressure groups and special interests are going to manipulate this State and take charge.”

It is fitting that a Black civil rights activist, Rev. Raphael Warnock, and a Jewish documentary filmmaker, Jon Ossoff, may become Georgia’s senators as a result. It is even more fitting that the white supremacist-in-chief, Donald Trump, is helping make this happen.

According to his conspiracy fever dream, Trump did not lose the 2020 election. Instead, his hand-picked judges, his attorney general, sycophant governors, dozens of conservative election officials, and hundreds of Republican poll workers all conspired with the Democratic presidential candidate to orchestrate the greatest election theft in world history. That’s extremely impressive given that believers in this theory simultaneously argue that Biden has lost all his mental faculties.

Trump and his allies have tried to get states to invalidate millions of African American votes by complaining of false corruption in cities with large Black populations, such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Their hateful bigotry, however, is having the opposite effect. Not only have they been unsuccessful in every attempt to throw out legal votes, their narrative for justifying this disgraceful activity requires getting Republican voters to believe that elections across the nation are illegitimate. This poses a real problem in Georgia, but Trump would rather lose Senate seats than have his followers believe he’s a loser. Trump’s narrative that the election in Georgia was rigged takes precedence over everything to his supporters—even if it means sacrificing the Republican runoff candidates.

"Where is Kelly Loeffler here? Where is David Perdue?" said [Lin] Wood, who unsuccessfully sued Georgia seeking to stop the presidential election's certification. "He ought to be standing right here.

"Do not be fooled twice," he added. "This is Georgia. We ain't dumb. We're not going to vote on Jan. 5 on another machine made by China. You're not going to fool Georgians again. If Kelly Loeffler wants your vote, if David Perdue wants your vote, they've got to earn it."

This rhetoric poses an obvious problem for Republicans who want to support Trump, and it conflicts with reality. The GOP can’t have it both ways, although Stephen Colbert certainly tried.

Trump’s recent visit to Georgia, which was supposed to help quell the exodus, appears to have actually made things worse. For nearly two hours, Trump spewed made-up stories to the crowd. There was the one about tons of imaginary votes in suitcases, the lie that he won every single battleground state, and the fantasy that he would somehow still be president after Jan. 20. If that last part was true, of course, then Republicans wouldn’t be arguing that they need the Peach State’s Senate seats to block the Biden administration. That approach only works if you accept that Biden is the incoming president—something both David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler accidentally acknowledged. Trump ranted nonstop to his followers at his rally about how corrupt he believed the Georgia election was, and criticized all of the GOP officials that are in charge of the January election.

Trump listed his many grievances, and only gave Loeffler and Perdue a combined total of two minutes to speak—even though the rally was supposed to be for them. When the candidates spoke, the audience didn’t even listen; instead, they chanted “Stop the Steal” and “Fight for Trump.” Trump also told his supporters to “never forget” how Georgia Republican politicians didn’t help him overturn the election results like the ones he was supposed to be supporting.

Democratic groups, of course, are more than happy to support the president on this particular stance. The Really American PAC had the clever idea of crowdfunding billboards placed throughout Georgia’s reddest and rural counties with messages such as "Perdue/Loeffler Didn't Deliver For Trump, Don't Deliver For Them." The clearest indication that the billboards have been effective is the outrage among right-wing outlets, such as Fox News and Breitbart, which have both posted front-page articles attacking the group for “deceiving voters”—something they suddenly seem to mind. The Georgia GOP also sent out their spokeswoman to complain about the group and promise that their tactics wouldn’t work. If that was the case, why bother bringing it up?

Another PAC, MeidasTouch, also decided to get in on the fun.

How dare they quote the president verbatim?

All of these efforts are having an effect. Georgia Republicans, who were all on the same page on Election Day, are now split on whether they will participate in the runoff election. 

Democrats, meanwhile, are in the unique position of playing smarter politics than Republicans by running Warnock and Ossoff as a team, which plays to the strengths of each candidate. They are holding joint events and framing campaigns around what they could accomplish together for Georgia, as well as the U.S., if they are both sent to Washington. Pairing the longtime pastor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church with a young, progressive Jewish activist also helps represent the diversity of the Democratic party.  

Republicans are trying the team strategy too, but in their case it’s highlighting the party’s problems and the candidates’ flaws more than anything else. Both Loeffler and Perdue are not only obscenely wealthy, but they are the two of the most corrupt people currently serving in the Senate. Both downplayed the virus and used their positions to quietly move their money so they'd benefit from the crisis. These failings are magnified by running together, as highlighted in this ad by MeidasTouch.

 

In fact, neither of the Republican candidates has much of a record to run on, so they are leaning on the standard racist GOP playbook. David Perdue ran an ad that digitally enlarged Jon Ossoff’s nose, and Kelly Loeffler went full Trump with racist dog whistles against Raphael Warnock. Georgia can’t turn blue fast enough.

Fortunately, Democrats seem to be making all of the right moves this time. They nationalized the significance of the election by focusing on the benefits of retaking the Senate, which not only ensures a large turnout, but also helps with generating critical out-of-state support. Remember: Even though South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison was a longshot candidate in a red state, thanks to nationwide hatred of Sen. Lindsey Graham, he was able to raise well over $100 million in 2020.

Democrats also seem to be hyperfocused on turnout, which is the key to winning any special election. One million absentee ballots have already been requested, which is good news for the blue team since those historically break heavily for Democrats. The Republicans, meanwhile, have repeatedly and foolishly attacked voting by mail, led by Donald Trump. This means that Republicans have to hope for a large in-person turnout—without their cult leader at the top of the ticket. We did this already with the midterms in 2018, and the results weren’t good—and there was no GOP civil war back then.

Early voting begins Dec. 14, which is the same day that electors from all 50 states meet to place their official votes for Joe Biden from their respective states. Recent polls for the runoff election show Rev. Warnock slightly ahead of Sen. Loeffler, while the Perdue-Ossoff race is a dead heat.

We need all hands on deck, so please pledge to do just one thing to help each Senate candidate win. Fortunately, with all eyes on Georgia, there are myriad ways to help.

A group of 1,000 video editors, graphic designers, writers, and media developers formed a collective called Creatives for Georgia just to create digital content for the special election. Working with both the campaigns and several activist groups, the group is coordinating messaging for voter persuasion, voter turnout, and countering misinformation. Anyone who wants to help needs simply fill out an online form and they’ll be matched to a multitude of projects to choose from. Although this collective model isn’t a new concept, the scale is unprecedented.

If you’re not the creative type, you can still help. Start with the Senate campaigns themselves—they’re full of volunteer opportunities ranging from networking for donations to simply texting.

• Raphael Warnock’s campaign: Warnock for Georgia

• Jon Ossoff’s campaign: Electjon

If you want to donate to both candidates with one link, Daily Kos has you covered.

There are also multiple BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)-led organizations helping out in Georgia, and they need volunteers.

• Asian-Americans Advancing Justice

• Black Votes Matter

• GALEO 

• Mijente

• NAACP Georgia

• Poder Latinx

If you want to donate to all of these organizations and more with just one link, again, Daily Kos has you covered.

There are also phone banking opportunities, such as Mobilize Us and Together for 2020. You can also sign up to speak with Georgia voters to ensure they understand their voting rights with Fair Fight or The New Georgia Project.

Finally, if you live in Georgia, make sure you vote in this election and bring a friend. If you are able to volunteer to work the polls on Election Day, please do! Unfortunately, a lot of election workers are being threatened, and with few notable exceptions, Georgia’s Republican leaders have been silent about it.

We need to safeguard the election. Nothing we do will matter if we allow Trump supporters to intimidate election workers and sabotage the election.

The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting starts Dec. 14.

For anyone concerned about the future of this country, the last few weeks have been anything but reassuring. Yes, the Trump campaign’s quest to overturn the election results has yielded a string of embarrassing failures, as courts across the country, with virtual unanimity, slapped down dozens of abusive, evidence-challenged, and frivolous lawsuits, even as the legal maneuvers themselves became more farfetched and fantasy-driven. And yes, thus far our legal system has generally held its ground in the face of these politically motivated attempts to twist it off its foundations.

But as has been pointed out repeatedly, the poison introduced by such toxic abuses of the system doesn’t just disappear. These seemingly scattershot legal trial balloons will leave an impression simply because they move, however invisibly, the infamous Overton window, subtly redefining what type of conduct is and is not tolerable to our society.

But things are more insidious than that.

It’s a fundamental principle that American democracy is dependent on fealty to the rule of law, but it’s less acknowledged that the “rule of law” itself is also dependent on something called “truth.” In criminal law, to convict someone of a crime generally requires a finding of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” In civil cases the proof threshold is a lesser one, proof by a “preponderance of the evidence,” or in some cases, “clear and convincing evidence.” All of these formulations are different ways of getting to the truth of the matter at hand. Since there is rarely something as recognizable as an “absolute truth,” such “truths” are, by necessity, approximations: reflections of our best, though imperfect, human efforts to determine what the facts of the matter actually are.

When these courts threw out or otherwise disposed of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, nearly all of them referred to the complete absence of any evidence put forward to support them. Still, again and again, even down to the last-ditch filing on Tuesday in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump campaign, with either the tacit or full-fledged support of the Republican Party, continued to insist that its bald assertions and arguments should be afforded the same consideration applied to real facts. They continued to insist that their contrived, bare, and hyperbolic accusations of some sinister “plot” against Donald Trump should be treated with the same deference as actual evidence.

In effect, they asked our legal system, over and over, to agree that 2+2=5, that A=B, that fraud should be assumed and investigated where none could possibly exist. Trump’s team demanded that zero credible evidence should nonetheless lead to a drastic result in their favor, a result that would repudiate the entirety of our democratic-based system of government. In other words, they’ve repeatedly asked the courts to discard truth.

As long as the courts refused to do that, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything will turn out okay. But the Trump campaign, and the Republican Party that prop it up, never actually expected these lawsuits to be successful. Their own lawyers, at least the ones employed by genuine, “respectable” law firms knew exactly where they were headed—they were simply being paid (at least in theory) to do a job. Lawyers don’t drive lawsuits—their clients do; in this case, they had a client who desperately wanted to create a narrative. Trump’s vehicle to this goal was to abuse the legal system, something he’s done all his life. It was a narrative that the whole Republican Party would end up buying into: that truth didn’t matter anymore. It was the story they were selling to the 70 million or so Trump voters that mattered. And they counted on their credulous base, snug in its information bubble, to accept exactly what they were being told.

Jim Small, writing for the Arizona Mirror, diagnosed this dangerous susceptibility on the part of the Republican electorate just after the 2018 midterms. Then, the GOP did a trial run at spinning a false fraud narrative of why and how then-candidate Kyrsten Sinema defeated former Sen. Martha McSally in that state’s 2018 election; how eagerly the Republican rank and file embraced that phony narrative. At that time, Small described their unsettling capacity for willing self-delusion.

But they want to believe, with as much sincerity as they’re able to trick themselves into faking, the fantasy that there is fraud, that there is a conspiracy to steal political power away from them, that their political opponents are evil and their time in positions of power will be nightmarish. Facts that refute the lie are instead used as evidence of the conspiracy, and truth-tellers become conspirators.

Why?

Well, fantasies – and nightmares, in particular – are exciting. The day-to-day existence can be mundane: cleaning the litter box, the drudgery of our jobs, doing laundry, and our orderly and peaceful elections. The prospect of a massive evil conspiracy of evil conspirators conspiring to do evil spices things up.

They’re having fun. They’re enjoying this. It delights them. A make-believe session of feigned indignation over imaginary outrages is a close substitute for emotional fulfillment.

But after four years, Small’s assessment of Republican voters has become considerably darker, as what once could have been written off as a feigned “distraction” has morphed, outright, into a life-affirming obsession. Writing again this month for the Mirror, Small quoted author Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1962 novel Mother Night examines how the human capacity for self-deception can, if unchecked, ruin entire populations.

His warning is a chilling one, laid out in the opening sentences: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Republicans have spent four years ignoring and then humoring and then repeating Trump’s vile and utterly false claims that strike at the heart of our democracy. Now, they are demanding exceptional and unprecedented remedies to problems that were fabricated out of whole cloth. ...

They’ve become what they pretended to be.

What George Packer wrote this week in The Atlantic dovetails completely with that analysis: The myth that Republicans were somehow “stabbed in the back” and betrayed by unseen forces has now taken hold of the Party, and most of its constituents.

So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.

For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.

For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling.

The consequences of this warped and radical departure from truth are coming into clear focus as the Trump charade careens toward its inevitable endgame. We see the rage building as deluded hordes of armed vigilantes gather to harass and intimidate government servants for doing their job. We see Republican governors taking Gestapo-like revenge on people for speaking the truth in the face of their lies. We see cowed public officials refusing to acknowledge the truth out of fear for their lives. And we see efforts like this shameful document, where elected state officials, who presumably should know better, now feel free to advocate disenfranchising their own citizens as a token of their obedience to Donald Trump.

Where a political party is subordinate to a cult of personality, with rare exceptions, any deviation from the party line is politically suicidal. Fear of being labelled an apostate or a heretic keeps people in line, because their political survival depends on echoing the dogma spewed by the leader. This is why brutal, dictatorship-style regimes, such as North Korea, for example, do not simply whither away but sustain themselves in perpetuity. In such regimes, truth becomes forever the province of whatever the leader says it is. In such an environment, whatever institutions exist that oppose that made-up “truth” ultimately must run up against the numbers and power of the population so deceived, and ultimately those institutions must either stand or crumble.

The Trump campaign knew that if it could persuade a single federal or state appellate judge that 2+2 did in fact equal 5, they would have elevated this disregard of truth to a level of respectability which it desperately wants to achieve. They didn’t initiate over 50 meritless lawsuits because they were expecting to win, but because they wanted to game the system in the future. They wanted to work the refs to see what could be achieved in warping truth to their own ends. They know that the inroads already made with our legislative branch of government will only inspire further attempts to co-opt the judiciary, because as any lawyer can tell you, while judges may swear to uphold the law, judicial decisions are often made with a nod toward the undercurrents of society as a whole.

And they know that if the judiciary succumbs to the abandonment of facts, the final arbiter of truth in this country all but disappears.

For the next six weeks or so, Republicans can hide behind the excuse that Donald Trump is still the occupant of the Oval Office. As of Jan. 20, they will no longer have that excuse. After that, and in the months that follow, we will all be seeing just how deep this rot runs within the Republican Party, how far they intend to goad their own constituents down this ever-circling rabbit-hole of grievance, and most importantly, whether they have any inclination at all to respond to the urgent needs of the American people. In the midst of an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, to have one political party gamely attempting to dig us out of this abyss while the other remains totally enamored by delusions, lies, and hateful revenge fantasies is simply unsustainable.

One truth, and one reality, is going to have to win out in the end.

We need all hands on deck to win the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, and you can volunteer from wherever you are. Click here to see the Georgia volunteer activities that work best for you.

It should come as no surprise that the same GOP senator who did nothing as President Donald Trump spread a dangerous denial of his election loss to a Georgia crowd remained silent following a violent attack on a man holding a sign for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Sen. Kelly Loeffler didn't dedicate as much as a social media post to condemn violence Sunday morning, and she apparently didn’t find responding to Newsweek’s request for comment on the incident worthy of her time either. Both Democrats competing to unseat Republicans in the upcoming Senate runoff did.

The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting starts Dec. 14.  

“There aren't even words to explain how completely unacceptable this kind of violence is toward any human being. I hope the other candidates in this runoff election will join me in condemning this and I'm calling on all of our supporters to treat each other with respect,” Ossoff tweeted Saturday. Warnock did exactly that. “I am relieved the person harmed in this attack is recovering. There is no place for violence in our democracy and that is a something we should all agree on,” he tweeted shortly after Ossoff.

Even Republican Sen. David Perdue spoke out against the violence on Twitter. “Behavior like this is absolutely disgusting and has no place in our civil society. Bonnie and I are praying for the victim and grateful for the law enforcement who arrested the suspected perpetrator,” he said in the tweet.

Henry County police told Channel 2 Action News the suspect punched the victim in the face and tore his sign, and he was treated and released by paramedics on the scene. The suspect, who authorities haven’t identified to the public yet, was arrested and charged with battery.

Elton Alexander, a Democratic city councilman in Stockbridge, shared photos of the unidentified man injured Saturday at a Get Out the Vote rally on Hudson Bridge Road. Stockbridge is about 25 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta and has a population that is more than 60% Black. “The attack was totally unprovoked during our rally to get out the vote,” Alexander tweeted. “He is ok under the circumstances. We will not tolerate this & the attacker will be prosecuted. We work hard to get out the vote.  Our vote will change America.”

RELATED: Democrat attacked, bloodied, for holding Ossoff/Warnock signs at Democratic Georgia GOTV rally

Let’s give GOP Leader Mitch McConnell the boot! Give $4 right now so McConnell can suffer the next six years in the minority.

The dozens of postelection lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and his Republican supporters are hard to keep track of, but the scorecard is as clear as it is grim for the president’s side: one modest victory versus 55 losses—and counting.

The defeats are piling up so fast—the Supreme Court summarily rejected two lawsuits inside of four days—and the judges’ rebukes have been so withering that many people outside the legal profession wonder why trained lawyers are being allowed to persist in this doomed effort to overturn the results of an election that has been described by the president’s own elections officials as the “most secure in American history.” Isn’t there some kind of rule against this?

There is. In federal court (where 11 of the cases have been brought) it’s called Rule 11. And courts have used it many times to discourage the very kinds of legally insufficient and bad faith claims that have been advanced by Rudy Giuliani and his so-called elite strike force of attorneys.

First, it helps to understand how unusual it is that the president’s cases are getting tossed so quickly. Generally, plaintiffs get the benefit of the doubt when they’re filing lawsuits. If they have some combination of factual support for their complaint and an existing law to apply, courts are inclined to let the cases proceed. But the Trump campaign and its Republican allies are falling far short of even these low thresholds on evidentiary and legal grounds. And this is why judges have been so quick to shut them down or refuse to even hear them, as happened this week twice at the Supreme Court.

It’s not uncommon for people who proceed without counsel to bring spurious complaints about fanciful government conspiracies or file suits that misunderstand the law. Judges don’t usually penalize lay people for their mistakes. But when courts suspect that trained lawyers know of their cases’ shortcomings and deficiencies and filed them anyway, they can tell litigants “enough is enough.”

And the primary way federal judges do it is with Rule 11. Rule 11 is a congressionally sanctioned tool that enables judges to keep attorneys honest in their courtrooms. Its goal is to deter parties from filing and pursuing frivolous lawsuits, and ensuring fairness to those on the other side who might have been unfairly hauled into court. Baseless claims waste courts’ finite time and resources, clogging the judicial system and hindering meritorious claims from proceeding.

Some might argue that allegations that are as serious-sounding as Trump’s assertion of “the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States” deserve extra latitude, that the volume of complaints is somehow its own evidence of how widespread the problem is.

The opposite is true. The insufficiency of the claims is evidence of bad faith, and that is precisely what Rule 11 is designed to punish. Trump supporters’ litigious assault on the 2020 election results is even more troubling than most groundless claims because it creates a perverse incentive for candidates and parties to abuse the courts for political gain in future high-profile elections.

Rule 11 is a “stop-and-think” mandate, which basically requires lawyers and parties to certify when signing their names to federal court filings that they have some law and some facts on their side. When a party files a lawsuit, it accordingly certifies that “the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or establishing new law.” Courts cannot create new laws—legislatures do that.

To be sure, laws evolve to meet new factual scenarios. This is what Rule 11 means when it refers to a nonfrivolous argument for extending new law. The Supreme Court did this, for example, when it extended marriage rights to gay couples under preexisting constitutional standards of due process and equal protection under the 14th Amendment. (Before Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, states could ban same-sex marriages.) But that’s not what’s happening with Trump’s postelection cases.

Giuliani and other lawyers on the plaintiffs’ side of these cases, when pressed by judges, have admitted they are not claiming fraud, despite what they have said publicly for weeks. Fraud entails the telling of meaningful lies that harm victims. In the election context, fraud could mean lying about being a registered voter, or lying about being an American citizen, or using the identity of a voter who is actually dead.

So the Trump campaign and like-minded plaintiffs have resorted to tortured interpretations of other laws to cram square pegs into round holes. Take the latest—but potentially most dangerous—the failed lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which sought to cancel the votes legitimately cast by millions of citizens of four other states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Seventeen additional states and 126 congressional Republicans have since joined Paxton, whose petition leapfrogged over two tiers of lower courts and was filed directly in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Paxton’s suit had a number of flaws, but for purposes of the Supreme Court’s equivalent to Rule 11, it cannot be overemphasized that no law requires legislatures from one state (here, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) to consider other states’ feelings (here, Texas) when they make their own election laws. Paxton’s suit basically complained about just that: that by passing their own election laws in ways that led to “[i]ntrastate differences in the treatment of voters,” the defendant states somehow harmed Texas.

The Supreme Court’s unsigned order Friday slammed the door on that bogus argument: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

So, these lawsuits are scandalously thin on the law. They are also thin on facts.

Rule 11 treats signatures on court documents as certifications that “the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery.” Note the operative word here: reasonable. Courts apply a reasonableness standard to filings. Lawyers cannot file documents with allegations they know are false, for example. Likewise, lawyers can’t take something they pulled off of Reddit and put it in a complaint as the factual basis for a lawsuit. Rule 11 requires that the certification be made “to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances.”

Despite having told courts there is no evidence of fraud, Giuliani waved a binder before Michigan legislators recently, claiming it contained affidavits alleging widespread voter fraud. But even Giuliani apparently knows that whatever was in that binder is not enough to press a case in court. Lawyer Sidney Powell—with whom the Trump campaign cut ties after some particularly bizarre claims—has repeatedly alleged a conspiracy involving the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the creation of Georgia’s voting machines by Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. Lawyers cannot pull allegations out of hats without first conducting a reasonable inquiry into their accuracy. No surprise then that judges have already dismissed cases filed by Powell in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

So far, several of the postelection lawsuits aimed at overturning Joe Biden’s win could be sanctionable. In Arizona, for example, in dismissing a GOP lawsuit that sought an audit of county ballots and delay of the state’s election certification, Arizona State Court Judge John Hanna virtually invited the secretary of state to seek payment for attorney’s fees from the Arizona Republican Party for filing a lawsuit “without substantial justification” or “solely or primarily for delay or harassment.” In Bowyer v. Ducey, a federal judge in Arizona tossed out a Powell-led lawsuit challenging ballot signatures and machinery, noting that the allegations of impropriety were “sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence,” and were instead “largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections.” She added that it would be “extreme, and entirely unprecedented” to hear the claim.

The question remains: Will any of the attorneys involved in these specious cases be held accountable by a judge? Rule 11 sanctions (and their state-law equivalents) are rare. But rare doesn’t mean non-existent.

In White v. General Motors Corp., Inc., for example, the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit—where Justice Neil Gorsuch used to sit—ordered the plaintiffs and their lawyers to pay $172,382 to the other side in attorneys’ fees. The case alleged slander, but the complaint didn’t name the employee who allegedly committed the slander, and when the defendant found the employee and secured an affidavit denying the slander, the plaintiffs refused to withdraw the case. The court noted:

“[W]e have the tragedy of inept lawyers who failed to investigate their claims, and who compounded the court’s and the defendant’s problems in dealing with the case by adopting an extremely aggressive approach. Rule 11 should not be used to discourage advocacy, including that which challenges existing law. Nevertheless, the court is entitled to expect a reasonable level of competence and care on the part of the attorneys who appear before it, and to expect that claims submitted for adjudication by those attorneys will have a rational basis.”

Rule 11 sanctions are normally triggered when the offended party files a motion. The alleged wrongdoer gets 21 days to fix the problem, else the court gets involved. Courts can also prompt sanctions on their own—or “sua sponte.”

If it’s a party that brings up sanctions, courts can order monetary fines to be paid to the court under Rule 11 (not to the other party, for fear of creating incentives to seek sanctions as a moneymaking enterprise). Courts cannot impose money penalties on parties (e.g., the Trump campaign) for failing to understand the law. But parties can be ordered to pay monetary penalties for proffering baseless facts.

Moreover, courts can sanction parties and lawyers in ways that do not involve money. At the federal level, nonmonetary sanctions have included public reprimands, orders to undergo legal education, referrals to the bar for disciplinary proceedings, warnings, suspension or even disbarment, forced admission of the facts alleged by the other side, and bans on a party or attorney (e.g., Powell or Giuliani) from bringing similar suits without advance permission from the court.

Rule 11 provides a final basis for sanctioning lawyers and parties, and it’s critical. Whenever a paper is filed in a federal court, the person signing the paper certifies that “it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass” or “cause unnecessary delay.” The dozens of lawsuits that nitpick the hard work of hundreds of thousands of election officials, poll workers and volunteers as a basis for overturning Biden’s win are not about achieving justice. They are about hard-line politics, pure and simple.

Courts exist to do justice, not carry water for losing politicians. In this moment, lawyers and judges should use the tools provided under existing procedural rules to stop this kind of gamesmanship, and send a message to the bar that democracy is not to be toyed with in the hallowed halls of the judiciary.

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Donald Trump could potentially pardon himself of federal crimes—or resign a few minutes early and have Mike Pence do it for him—but he still has reason to sweat, thanks to a New York investigation that appears to be intensifying. A presidential pardon does not take care of state charges, and New York prosecutors have recently interviewed employees at Deutsche Bank, one of Trump’s big lenders, and at Trump’s insurance broker.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance continues to fight for Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, but isn’t sitting around waiting for that fight—now at the Supreme Court—to end. The exact outlines of the investigation aren’t public, but “earlier this year, they suggested in court papers that they were examining possible insurance, tax and bank-related fraud in the president’s corporate dealings,” The New York Times reports.

Recent interviews include Deutsche Bank employees who weren’t directly involved with the decision to lend to Trump but who could shed light on how lending decisions are usually made. 

Both the bank and Aon, Trump’s insurance broker, have been subpoenaed for documents related to their business with him. The Trump Organization itself was also hit with subpoenas last month relating to the tax-evading fees paid to TTT Consulting, apparently aka Ivanka Trump, that became public after the Times got copies of some years of Trump’s tax returns.

Trump won’t be able to use the White House as a shield against this starting on Jan. 20. It’ll be interesting to see which law firms are willing to work with him and how much payment they demand up front once he doesn’t have the Department of Justice acting as his personal attorney. 

Republican senator Thom Tillis has introduced a proposal to turn unauthorized commercial streaming of copyrighted material into a felony offense with a possible prison sentence. It's currently being included in a must-pass spending bill. Kotaku reports: Currently, such violations, no matter how severe, are considered misdemeanors rather than felonies, because the law regards streaming as a public performance. With Twitch currently in the crosshairs of the music industry, such a change would turn up the heat on streamers and Twitch even higher -- perhaps to an untenable degree. Other platforms, like YouTube, would almost certainly suffer as well. According to [Politico offshoot Protocol], House and Senate Judiciary Committees have agreed to package the streaming felony proposal with other controversial provisions that include the CASE act, which would establish a new court-like entity within the U.S. Copyright Office to resolve copyright disputes, and the Trademark Modernization Act, which would give the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office more flexibility to crack down on illegitimate claims from foreign countries. It's not difficult to see why Tillis would push a proposal that benefits big companies in the entertainment industry to the detriment of regular people; The American Prospect points out that in the past couple years, Tillis' campaign committee and leadership received donations totaling out to well over $100,000 from PACs with ties to the Motion Picture Association, Sony Pictures, Universal Music Group, Comcast & NBC Universal, The Internet and Television Association, Salem Media Group, and Warner Music, among many others.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jerry Falwell Jr. has dropped a defamation lawsuit filed against Liberty University in October following revelations of his and Becki Falwell’s three-way affair with “pool boy” Giancarlo Granda.

MSN reports: “In his lawsuit, Falwell alleged that Liberty damaged his reputation because it accepted without verifying what he called false statements made by a man who had an affair with Falwell’s wife and attempted to extort them. ‘I’ve decided to take a time out from my litigation against Liberty University, but I will continue to keep all options on the table for an appropriate resolution to the matter,’ Falwell said in a statement. In a statement, the school said its leaders are pleased he has dropped the lawsuit and is working to find someone to succeed him.”

Falwell resigned as president of Liberty University after Granda, a former “pool boy” Falwell Jr. said was extorting him and his wife over an alleged affair told Reuters that Falwell “enjoyed watching from the corner of the room” while Granda had sex with his wife.

Liberty U. has since launched an investigation of Falwell’s financial , real estate, and legal dealings while at the university.

The post Jerry Falwell Jr. Drops Defamation Lawsuit Against Liberty University Filed in Wake of Pool Boy Scandal appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Today's News:

[President Biden could adjourn Congress to make recess appointments. Or Vice President Harris could simply refuse to recognize Senator McConnell as majority leader]

If the Democratic candidates in Georgia are able to win both seats, the Senate will split 50-50, and in light of Vice President Harris's role, the Democrats would be deemed the majority party. But if one, or both Republican candidates prevail, the Republicans would be deemed the majority party. If Senator McConnell has the gavel, then there is no guarantee that President Biden's nominees will get floor votes. Moreover, legislation that passes the Democratic-controlled House would be dead on arrival. Is there anything the Biden Administration can do to break that gridlock?

Noel Canning effectively foreclosed the use of the recess appointment power with a divided Congress. So long as McConnell keeps Senate breaks less than three days, there would not be a recess long enough to trigger the Recess Appointments Clause. But Noel Canning recognize a workaround: the President can adjourn Congress, force a recess of sufficient length, and make a recess appointment. (Noel Canning was not clear on how long that break had to be; ten days is presumably enough). In Noel Canning, Justice Breyer wrote:

Finally, the Solicitor General warns that our holding may "'disrup[t] the proper balance between the coordinate branches by preventing the Executive Branch from accomplishing its constitutionally assigned functions.'" Brief for Petitioner 64 (quoting Morrison v. Olson(1988)). We do not see, however, how our holding could significantly alter the constitutional balance. Most appointments are not controversial and do not produce friction between the branches. Where political controversy is serious, the Senate unquestionably has other methods of preventing recess appointments. As the Solicitor General concedes, the Senate could preclude the President from making recess appointments by holding a series of twice-a-week ordinary (not pro forma) sessions. And the nature of the business conducted at those ordinary sessions — whether, for example, Senators must vote on nominations, or may return to their home States to meet with their constituents — is a matter for the Senate to decide. The Constitution also gives the President (if he has enough allies in Congress) a way to force a recess. Art. II, § 3 ("[I]n Case of Disagreement between [the Houses], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, [the President] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper"). Moreover, the President and Senators engage with each other in many different ways and have a variety of methods of encouraging each other to accept their points of view.

In April, I wrote about the possibility of President Trump exercising this power. He ultimately did not. Now, Professor Peter Shane writes that the adjournment power may be a tool for the Biden Administration's arsenal:

But here's the surprise Biden could spring: The so-called adjournment clause in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution anticipates the possibility of a "disagreement" between the House and the Senate "with Respect to the Time of Adjournment." Should that happen—for example, if one house of Congress wanted to leave town and the other wanted to stay in session—the Constitution authorizes the president to adjourn both chambers "to such Time as he shall think proper." If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were amenable, she could propose to the Senate a 10-day period of adjournment, which would be long enough to enable recess appointments. The Senate likely would disagree in order to block those appointments. But that refusal would trigger the president's adjournment power. With the Senate adjourned for at least 10 days, an entire cabinet and its principal deputies could be appointed.

Shane acknowledges that no President has ever used this power before. But hardball.

During the founding era, the adjournment power elicited virtually no debate. Its actual purpose is obscure; it seems to be a kind of truncated holdover from the Crown's power to "prorogue," or dissolve, Parliament. But if Biden wants to play hardball, this clause offers a potentially big bat with which to threaten the opposing team.

Professor Neil Buchanan writes about some even harder hardball. Forget recess appointments. Vice President Harris, as President of the Senate, could simply refuse to recognize Senator McConnell as the majority leader.

There is only one constitutional statement regarding the leadership of the Senate, which is that the Vice President is the presiding officer of that house of Congress.  Moreover, the leadership norms that have governed the Senate in our lifetimes are not even set by statute, much less in the Constitution itself.  They are truly norms.  Thus, I argued, the Democrats could (but probably will not) employ a Republican-style breaking of norms by having Vice President Kamala Harris refuse to recognize Mitch McConnell as the person who actually dictates the business of the Senate, including most importantly the determination of which items of business receive floor votes.

Presumably, Harris could force floor votes on pending judicial nominees, and perhaps even force floor votes on legislation that passed the House. Buchanan explains:

Vice President Harris can give "priority recognition" to any senator to control the agenda and to schedule floor votes.  She could designate McConnell, but she could also designate Schumer, Tammy Baldwin, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, or even the newest Senator, Mark Kelly of Arizona.  (Susan Collins would surely be too "concerned" to accept the position.)  Notably, because any attempt to amend the Senate's rules to formalize McConnell's power would have to be brought up for a vote, Harris could prevent that from happening. . . . Harris could thus simply say that Biden's nominees will all receive votes, and if Republicans can muster 51 votes against any of them, so be it.  The point would be to hold that up-or-down vote, on the record.

I do not know nearly enough about the Senate's rules to decide if this move would even be feasible, absent a rule change. And presumably, that rule change would require a majority. But hardball.

What is the next level of the hardball? Can McConnell call the Sergeant at Arms to arrest the President of the Senate, who refuses to recognize him? Hardball. Or if the GOP takes the House in 2022, could the sitting VP be impeached? (We could finally see what happens if the VP has to preside at her own impeachment trial). Hardball.

Hardball. Get used to that phrase. Hardball. You will be hearing it nonstop for the next four years. I would be much more comfortable if people simply admitted that "hardball" is code for "We have power so we will use it." Trying to dress up and justify politics in euphemistic constitutional garb has never interested me.

On Friday evening, the Supreme Court refused to take up the ridiculous, seditious case put forward by the state of Texas. It was an appropriate action, but in many ways, it might have better if other justices had sided with Alito and Thomas and given the case a hearing … so that it could be slapped down hard, with all its excesses and false statements underlined, and the genuinely traitorous nature of the entire action made clear. The 126-word refusal set down by the Court may have been a neat answer to the 126 House Republicans who signed on to this blatant attempt to overthrow democracy, but another five pages of tightly worded contempt would have served the moment much more clearly.

But just because the suit is dismissed doesn’t mean this is over. That’s not to say that Rudy Giuliani is going to find some other court (People’s? Public opinion? Owls?) where his nonsense conjectures are more readily accepted. He’s not. It doesn’t mean that the Electoral College will betray the nation and reinstall Donald Trump regardless of the votes. They won’t.

It means that the Republicans fired a very serious shot at the United States. And the nation had better fire back.

On Saturday morning, Donald Trump is still engaged in a seething response to the Supreme Court decision. As might be expected, Trump is sheltering behind the idea that the case was dismissed on a technicality, to go on claiming that the content of the Texas suit—a hodgepodge of lies, damnable lies, and twisted fantasy—was just peachy. In Trump’s mind, it was only that bit about “standing” that prevented the Court from uncovering the way that Democrats and dead dictators conspired to reprogram America’s voting machines.

Trump’s tweets are unlikely to ever garner any greater punishment than the warning label Twitter is affixing to each post. But at this point, allowing Trump to rant may be a service. No only is he continuing to demonstrate just how disconnected he is from any objective reality, but among other things, Trump is busily attacking Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp three weeks before the Senate runoff in that state. So … sure. Let him do that.

That Trump would refuse to concede, claim that he was the real winner, pout, stomp his foot, and repeatedly throw Rudy Giuliani at the wall was all perfectly predictable. This is who Trump is. He does not have it in him to be gracious in defeat (or in victory). His petulance and lies were all a foregone conclusion.

But that doesn’t mean that anyone else had to support him. From the moment it became clear that Joe Biden had decisively defeated Trump, every Republican in the House, every Republican in the Senate, and every Republican official in states across the nation had the opportunity to acknowledge that outcome and congratulate the president-elect. Which is exactly what Democrats at every level did when Trump was elected back in 2016.

Instead, Republicans in 2020 first waged a conspiracy of silence, under the claim that they were giving Trump’s delicate feelings time to heal. Then, one after another, they moved from bystanders to active participants in an attempt to upend the election. And that attempt moved to outright sedition. Nowhere was that more clear than in the 126 members of the House who signed onto the Texas suit. Republicans were, in fact, so eager to raise their hands to join Traitors for Trump that they updated the list just to fit in more names.

This is how Michael Steele—former chairman of the Republican National Convention—describes the actions of those Republicans.

“The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country. It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.”

And here’s what Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has to say about the actions by other members of her chamber.

“The 126 Republican Members that signed onto this lawsuit brought dishonor to the House.  Instead of upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution, they chose to subvert the Constitution and undermine public trust in our sacred democratic institutions.”

That affront, that dishonor, that indelible stain has to be marked by action. It has to be marked by censure and expulsion. By refusal to seat those involved. By consequences that are lasting and impactful. Because if the Republicans get to take this shot at the nation and stroll away with chins held high, they will take another, and another. And not every one will miss.

Team Trump’s ongoing efforts to remake the entire U.S. government in the image of Donald Trump before he’s forced out of office on Jan. 20 are now putting a major bigot in charge of Voice of America. Michael Pack, the Trump-appointed CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, is reassigning the acting director of VOA, a career journalist, and replacing him with Robert Reilly, the author of books like Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything and The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

Elez Biberaj, the acting director being forced out of the role, was blunt about what’s going on in an email to staff.

“The last six months have perhaps been the most challenging period in VOA's recent history," he wrote. "Regrettably, this period was characterized by an adversarial relationship between VOA and USAGM. Some agency officials failed to respect rules, protocols and processes that I considered inviolable, and displayed an indifference to the disruptive impact their actions and decisions had on VOA's operations and mission."

It’s not just managerial disruption. “Attempts to trample VOA's journalistic independence threatened to undermine our hard-won credibility at a time of global democratic backsliding and increased international threats to America's values and moral leadership.”

Those threats include an effort to kill off the military newspaper Stars & Stripes and an attack by political appointees on an experienced VOA reporter for insufficient loyalty to Trump. And now: Robert Reilly. But don’t for a minute think that the elevation of a bigot like Reilly is specific to Trump—he was previously the director of VOA under George W. Bush.

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he’ll easily be able to replace Pack as the head of the Agency for Global Media, but replacing Reilly may actually be more difficult because of provisions the House put in the defense spending bill to rein in Pack’s abuses. Go figure.