Author: Matthew G. Saroff

This is Actually a Good Idea

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Which is the last thing that I would expect from Trump and Evil Minions™, but the proposal to award H1B visas on the basis of highest salary first, instead of doing so through a lottery.

My idea was to go through a lottery process, but this is also an elegant solution to the problem, assuming that the Indian body shops don’t manage to incorporate kick-backs into their recruiting.

I still favor a bid process for H1B applications though:

The Trump administration has proposed changes to the H-1B visa that will see it abolish the current lottery process and instead prioritise highly paid workers.

“Modifying the H-1B cap selection process by replacing the random selection process with a wage-level-based selection process is a better way to allocate H-1Bs when demand exceeds supply,” says a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement of the proposed policy.

“If finalized as proposed, this new selection process would incentivize employers to offer higher wages or petition for positions requiring higher skills and higher-skilled workers instead of using the program to fill relatively lower-paid vacancies.”

………

“The H-1B program is often exploited and abused by U.S. employers, and their U.S. clients, primarily seeking to hire foreign workers and pay lower wages,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli. “The current use of random selection to allocate H-1B visas …. fails to leverage the H-1B program to truly compete for the world’s best and brightest, and hurts American workers by bringing in relatively lower-paid foreign labor at the expense of the American workforce.”

………

The document also suggests that economic benefits could possibly include:

  • A better chance of attracting skilled and highly paid workers to apply for the H-1B, plus the prospect of higher wages for visa applicants because paying them more would rank them more highly as visa applicants;
  • Increased job opportunities for lower-skilled US workers who would otherwise have to compete with H-1B visa-holder;
  • Increased wages for H-1B recipients whose earnings fall into middling earning bands.

This appears to actually be an well thought out and thoughtful policy.

I credit a few million monkeys chained to typewriters.

There Is a Metaphor Here ……… and a Joke

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Trump held a campaign rally in Nebraska, at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, and because of a shortage of buses and traffic congestion his supporters were left on the tarmac in freezing weather for hours.

At least 5 of the MAGAts were hospitalized for exposure:

By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.

But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear something was wrong.

The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the cold as police scrambled to help those most at risk get to warmth, and some were taken to hospitals.

………

By the end of the night, 30 people needed medical attention, Omaha police spokesman Michael Pecha said, though that was over the course of the event. Seven were taken to hospitals “with a variety of medical conditions.” It was not immediately clear how many of those were related to the lengthy wait.

………

After Trump’s speech, in which he promised that “we’re making that final turn” on the pandemic in a state where positivity rates exceed 20 percent, per the World-Herald, Trump flew away on Air Force One around 9 p.m. Attendees began lining up for buses to return to their cars.

By nearly 10:30 p.m., though, they were still waiting.

………

The crowds didn’t fully clear the rally site until after 12:30 a.m. — more than 3½ hours after Trump departed. A spokeswoman at one hospital network, CHI Health, told The Post that five people were treated “with minor complaints” at the nearby by Creighton University Medical Center. She declined to release additional information.

………

“Supporters of the President were brought in, but buses weren’t able to get back to transport people out. It’s freezing and snowy in Omaha tonight,” tweeted Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt (D). “He truly does not care about you.”

Seriously, you cannot make this sh%$ up.

And the UDF is Back

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If you followed avaition in the 1980s, you probably remember GE’s GE36 Unducted Fan. 

It was an F-404 derived core powering counter rotating free turbines attached to props.

There is now a Safran And GE are working another version of what was fondly referred to a load of bananas whirling around.

With sustainability front and center on the aerospace industry agenda, plans are firming up on both sides of the Atlantic for a new wave of ambitious large-scale technology demonstrators to pave the way for ultraefficient next-generation commercial airliners.

Ranging from advanced propulsion and airframe concepts to new systems, structures and fuels, the main demonstrators will form part of the proposed Clean Aviation initiative in Europe and the next round of NASA X-plane projects in the U.S. Clean Aviation, which is expected to succeed Europe’s long-running Clean Sky program, supports the European Union’s broader Horizon Europe research and innovation framework effort for 2021-27 and will feed technology into new civil aviation projects later this decade and into the 2030s.

………

Open rotors, also known as unducted fans or propfans, were initially developed in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s amid concerns over rising fuel costs. Although two concepts—GE’s GE36 and the Pratt & Whitney/Allison 578 DX—were flight-tested, both were shelved by the early 1990s after oil prices fell. Although development of propfans continued in Russia, it was not until greenhouse gas emissions became a legislative factor in the 2000s that Western interest in the concept was revived.

In the U.S. NASA, GE and the FAA collaborated between 2009 and 2012 on wind tunnel tests of an open rotor with blades developed using modern computer-based design methods. The tests showed up to a 3% improvement in net efficiency relative to the best 1980s design, while nominally achieving a 15-17-EPNdB noise margin to Chapter 4 limits.

Around the same time, two open-rotor concepts were evaluated in Europe under the SAGE effort, with a Rolls-Royce-led team evaluating a direct-drive propulsor system while a Safran-led group developed the geared pusher CROR. The Rolls project was later rescoped to focus on lean-burn combustion, while Safran developed a CROR ground demonstrator using its M88 military engine as a gas generator.

So the direct drive free turbine is not a part of the equation this time around, which is kind of a pity.

 I liked the elegance of that arrangement.

The Bobbsey Twins Are At It Again

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Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have veen indicted in yet another state for their program of threatening voter suppression robocalls.

Seeing as how they have shown themselves to be undeterred from their lives of crime by the prior indictments, I think that pre-trial detention without bail is called for:

A grand jury in Cleveland on Tuesday indicted right-wing political hoaxers Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman with felony charges connected to a multi-state robocall campaign that prosecutors say was meant to scare voters in urban areas with large minority populations out of voting by mail in the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Wohl, 22, of Irvine, California, and Burman, 54, of Arlington, Virginia, are indicted on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery in connection with more than 8,000 calls that were placed to residents of Cleveland and East Cleveland.

Wohl and Burkman already face similar criminal charges in Michigan and a civil lawsuit in New York City connected to the same scheme. They are free on a $100,000 bond after pleading not guilty to charges in that state.

Cuyahoga County court records say Wohl and Burkman are expected to make their first court appearance on Nov. 13.

The charges stem from a group called Project 1599, which Wohl and Burkman founded. The caller told potential voters that police and debt-collection companies could use personal information that voters put on their mail-in ballots to track down people who have outstanding warrants and credit-card debt. The claim is not true.

………

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office was the first to file charges against the duo. Ohio’s investigation began when U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge, a Cleveland Democrat, and others went to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office, which referred the case to prosecutors in Cuyahoga County, the Columbus Dispatch reporter earlier this month.

………

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose referenced the indictments Tuesday afternoon during an appearance on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s twice-weekly coronavirus address. DeWine invited LaRose on to discuss voter turnout and concerns about in-person voting.

LaRose said that his office received a tip through its voter-fraud website of “an incident of voter intimidation that was targeted particularly at the minority community,” which he called a “really ugly and pernicious act of voter intimidation.”

………

Wohl and Burkman have risen to notoriety in recent years as they blundered their way through a series of public announcements of scandals later discredited.

Wohl earlier this year began circulating what he said was a copy of a lab report showing that Biden had contracted COVID-19 and had 30 days to live. Biden and his campaign dismissed the report as fraudulent.

The pair is also accused of hiring one of Wohl’s ex-girlfriends to publicly accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is more popular and seen as more trustworthy on information about the pandemic than Trump, of assaulting her in a hotel in 2014. The woman later told a reporter that the accusation was false and that Wohl and Burkman paid her to levy it.

How do folks like this, and I am including the evil James O’Keefe (I know a good James O’Keef) stay out of jail.

If they weren’t white ……… Oh, now I get it.

Chutzpah Redefined

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Facebook is threatening academics doing a study on political advertisements breaking its rules, claiming ……… wait for it ……… that allowing users to voluntarily report what ads that they see is a violation of user privacy.

This is truly beyond satire:

Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform.

The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering’s Online Transparency Project’s Ad Observatory violates Facebook’s terms of service on bulk data collection and demanded it end the program immediately.

………

“We launched the Online Transparency Project two years ago to make it easier to see who was purchasing political ads on Facebook,” said co-founder Laura Edelson, of the project.

………

Facebook didn’t like this one bit, and responded with a warning letter on October 16, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The Silicon Valley titan wants the academic project shut down and all data deleted by November 30.

………

“We understand the intent behind your tool. However, the browser plugin scrapes information in violation of our terms, which are designed to protect people’s privacy.”

It seems the researchers aren’t backing down. On October 22, they published the latest research showing 12 political ads that had slipped under the radar as non-political on Facebook, some of which are still running.

………

Rather than rely on Facebook’s carefully controlled library, the NYU researchers built their own external approach and quickly discovered widespread disclosure violations which it says have helped facilitate the spread of election disinformation.

This is not a surprise.  After all, Facebook has been aggressively engaging in ad fraud, click thru fraud, and user fraud for years. 

This is not about protecting user privacy, since, after all the users in this case know what they are doing, this is about their concerns that their fraudulent behavior will be identified and traced.

I Have the World’s Smallest Violin

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It turns out that the Wall Street Journal is having a bit of an existential crisis as its audience dies off.

It appears that there are not enough younger than me who are willing to tolerate their worst-in-the-nation editorial page, particularly given the internet options for near real-time financial news.

Additionally, there are increasing tensions between not just the news and the editorial sides, where frequently the new stories have contradicted the OP/ED narrative, but between the reporters and the editors in the news division.

I am amused:

A brutal internal Wall Street Journal report obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals how the 130-year-old broadsheet is struggling mightily in the current digital and cultural age — such as not covering racial issues because reporters are afraid to mention them to editors, playing to the limited interests of its aging core audience, at times losing more subscribers than it takes in, and favoring “a print edition that lands in the recycling bin.”

The crown jewel of Rupert Murdoch’s media company has weathered months of strife between its news and opinion sections. In July, the same month the report is dated, more than 280 staffers at the Journal and sister newsroom Dow Jones signed a letter to its publisher calling for clearer distinctions between the opinion and news. “Opinion’s lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources,” the letter said.

This week, the Journal’s news division ran a reported piece that knocked down claims published in an opinion section piece just hours earlier. The opinion piece was trying to connect the dots on a smear alleging corruption by former vice president Joe Biden just days before the presidential election.

This has happened routinely since well before Murdoch bought the paper.

The opinion section has always been dishonest and insane.

The report, which one person at the Journal said was sent to some editors but not the whole newsroom, argues that many of the Wall Street Journal’s editors do not understand the internet and its readers — focusing its content instead on its long-term older male subscribers, rather than on a growing younger audience key to its survival. (Read the report here.)

………

“This is a months-old draft that contains outdated and inaccurate information,” Journal Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray said in a statement, without detailing which elements he considers inaccurate. “The Wall Street Journal is experiencing tremendous digital growth in audience, advertising and subscriptions, in fact has hit new records, and we are more excited than ever about our future. We of course regularly discuss and explore what we are doing, and where we should be going. We have a strong foundation as the best source of business, markets and economics news in the world, and we are incredibly proud to serve all of our readers. Our imperative is to make that service even better, and make it available to ever more people around the world. And we will.”

………

The key recommendations include major changes to what the paper covers, how it covers topics, and a rethinking of how it ignores some audiences.

One damning example of how the wider newsroom’s failed to listen to Black readers and its own digital-forward staff came from a spring 2020 project with the National Bar Association, the largest organization for Black legal professionals in the country. New audiences chief Ebony Reed shared WSJ articles with the group and asked them what questions they wanted the outlet to answer. Stories sparked from readers’ questions during COVID-19 gained wide audiences and traffic, the report states.

When National Bar Association members responded, she shared those questions with other newsroom editors as possible story ideas. “Story ideas ranged from Black Americans dying at a higher rate from coronavirus to questions about how vaping would affect those who contracted COVID-19,” weeks before similar stories appeared in other publications. “None were acted on,” the report states.

Ignoring Black folk is a feature, not a bug of the Wall Street Journal.

………

To address those appetites, the report recommends beats that focus on the environment, career issues, consumer products, drug addiction, racism, healthcare affordability, income inequality, and violent crime. It acknowledges that such a shift may be jarring to many of the paper’s reporters and editors, who put a high priority on traditional coverage that they feel are core to the paper’s brand.

The first step is to start applying basic fact checking on the editorial page.

Once you do that, you will find that the entire paper will become more adventurous.

I Hope That They Take Uber to the Cleaners

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Uber drivers in the EU are suing the Gypsy cab company for firing them via algorithm, which violates the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because the company fires drivers by algorithm.

The Europeans, and most of the rest of the world, are far less interested in buying the ride-hailing company’s “Because ……… Internet” crap:

Four Uber drivers in the UK and Portugal who claim they were dismissed unfairly by the company’s anti-fraud algorithm have challenged their account deactivations in a European court, citing GDPR protections against automated decision making.

The App Drivers & Couriers Union, a UK-based worker advocacy group, filed a legal complaint on Monday in a district court in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on behalf of the dismissed drivers.

“Uber has been allowed to violate employment law with impunity for years and now we are seeing a glimpse into an Orwellian world of work where workers have no rights and are managed by machine,” said Yaseen Aslam, President of the App Drivers & Couriers Union, in a statement. “If Uber is not checked, this practice will become the norm for everyone.”

Anton Ekker, the attorney representing the four former drivers – three from the UK and one from Portugal – said in a statement that the case represents the first challenge under the GDPR to automated decisions affecting the estimated 3.9m Uber drivers worldwide.

Article 22 of the GDPR states individuals “have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.”

I really hope that Uber gets nailed to the wall on this.

About F%$#ing Time

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Chile has finally a ditched the neoliberal Milton Friedman abomination of a constitution that the murderous Agusto Pinochet foisted on them almost 40 years ago.

Over 70% of voters have approved a plebiscite to replace that constitution.

Milton Friedman, and his “Chicago Boys” made Chile, and the rest of the world a much worse place.

At some point, we should total up the deaths from their machinations.

I don’t think that they would beat out Josef Stalin, but I’m pretty sure that they make Pol Pot look a piker.

First Hint that Today Will Not Be a Good News Day

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Nancy Pelosi has announced that she will stand as Speaker of the House again if the Democrats keep control of the Senate.

Because the increasingly geriatric and unimaginative Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) sees that we need less imagination, and even more geriatric leadership.

Please, just make it stop.

Also, if you are in her district, vote for Shahid Buttar, and if you are not, maybe phone bank for him.

Nancy Patricia Pelosi  will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Nancy Patricia Pelosi will you please go now!

Linkage

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You may recall that I posted a rather long, and very amusing video about the abuse of DMCA in the wolf porn fanfic community? 

Well, the crazy-ass author Addison Cain goes after Lindsay Ellis with ……… MORE DMCA complaints.

I do not know if there is a Nobel Prize for lameness, but her DMCA complaints were so lame that Youtube chose to disregard them.

That is seriously lame.

In any case, we get another long, and intensely amusing video from Ms. Ellis about this. (I want that hat)

This is Not the Mark of a Winning Foreign Policy

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That the US is supporting the Taliban in its fight against Isis in Afghanistan indicates that it’s not a particularly coherent foreign policy either. 

This is a direct consequence of our regime change Mousketeers misguided attempt at the overthrow of the Assads in Syria.

The Council on Foreign Relations crowd have absolutely no concept of blowback, despite our being the recipient of this phenomenon over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again:

Army Sgt. 1st Class Steve Frye was stuck on base last summer in Afghanistan, bored and fiddling around on a military network, when he came across live video footage of a battle in the Korengal Valley, where he had first seen combat 13 years earlier. It was infamous terrain, where at least 40 U.S. troops had died over the years, including some of Frye’s friends. Watching the Reaper drone footage closely, he saw that no American forces were involved in the fighting, and none from the Afghan government. Instead, the Taliban and the Islamic State were duking it out. Frye looked for confirmation online. Sure enough, America’s old enemy and its newer one were posting photos and video to propaganda channels as they tussled for control of the Korengal and its lucrative timber business.

What Frye didn’t know was that U.S. Special Operations forces were preparing to intervene in the fighting in Konar province in eastern Afghanistan — not by attacking both sides, but by using strikes from drones and other aircraft to help the Taliban. “What we’re doing with the strikes against ISIS is helping the Taliban move,” a member of the elite Joint Special Operations Command counterterrorism task force based at Bagram air base explained to me earlier this year, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the assistance was secret. The air power would give them an advantage by keeping the enemy pinned down.

Last fall and winter, as the JSOC task force was conducting the strikes, the Trump administration’s public line was that it was hammering the Taliban “harder than they have ever been hit before,” as the president put it — trying to force the group back to the negotiating table in Doha, Qatar, after President Trump put peace talks there on hold and canceled a secretly planned summit with Taliban leaders at Camp David. Administration officials signaled that they didn’t like or trust the Taliban and that, until it made more concessions, it could expect only blistering bombardment.

In reality, even as its warplanes have struck the Taliban in other parts of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been quietly helping the Taliban to weaken the Islamic State in its Konar stronghold and keep more of the country from falling into the hands of the group, which — unlike the Taliban — the United States views as an international terrorist organization with aspirations to strike America and Europe. Remarkably, it can do so without needing to communicate with the Taliban, by observing battle conditions and listening in on the group. Two members of the JSOC task force and another defense official described the assistance to me this year in interviews for a book about the war in Konar, all of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about it. (The U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan declined to comment for this story.)

As Rita May Brown (not Albert Einstein) said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Of Course She Did

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Lisa Murkowski has reversed course, and has announced that she will vote to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

She doesn’t care, her next election is in 2022, and she figures that it won’t be a problem then.

I will remind you what I say about the “Centrists” in both parties:

A liberal (moderate) Republican will:

  • Talk about the need to work across the aisle.
  • Plead for moderation.
  • Chastise his party for extremism.
  • Sometimes vote against his party.
  • When the vote is close, and it is important, he will vote with the Republicans.

A moderate (conservative) Democrat will:

  • Talk about the need to work across the aisle.
  • Plead for moderation.
  • Chastise his party for extremism.
  • Sometimes vote against his party.
  • When the vote is close, and it is important, he will vote with the Republicans.

Another Assassination Attempt

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Only this time, it was Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine who was targeted:

A Miami County resident has told police that he was approached about helping to arrest Gov. Mike DeWine at his Greene County home and try him for “tyranny.”

The case has been referred to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, though a spokesman declined to discuss further details, citing security reasons.

A resident of Piqua, in a police report filed last Friday, said that he was contacted earlier that day by Renea Turner, an activist who has been protesting DeWine’s coronavirus policies. Cleveland.com is withholding the man’s name for safety reasons.

During the call, Turner was reported to have said the plan was to arrest the governor later that weekend, try him for several supposed crimes, and sentence him to a penalty that could include exile or execution, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, which first reported the story, as well as state Rep. John Becker of Clermont County in a YouTube video.

I am not a lawyer, but this whole “exile” thing seems to be constitutionally dubious.

The goal here was an execution.  

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!! (On Sunday)

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We now have the 4th bank failure of the year, just 1 week after the the 3rd bank failure, this time it’s the Almena State Bank of Almena, KS.

So, we now have as many commercial bank failures in 2020 as we did in 2019.

I can’t help but think that there was some regulatory forbearance going on for electoral advantage, and that now that the election is just over a week away, the political appointees are too busy updating their resumes to worry about this.

Full FDIC list

So Not a Surprise

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It turns out that the bloke who fired shots into a police station during the George Floyd protests was a white supremacist trying to gin up conflict for a race war.

He was a part of the “Boogaloo” crowd.

I’m not sure if I would call this a false flag operation, but if it isn’t it’s false flag, it certainly is false flag’s next door neighbor.

In the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday.

A sworn affidavit by the FBI underlying the complaint reveals new details about a far-right anti-government group’s coordinated role in the violence that roiled through civil unrest over Floyd’s death while in police custody.

Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Boerne, Texas, is charged with one count of interstate travel to incite a riot for his alleged role in ramping up violence during the protests in Minneapolis on May 27 and 28. According to charges, Hunter, wearing a skull mask and tactical gear, shot 13 rounds at the south Minneapolis police headquarters while people were inside. He also looted and helped set the building ablaze, according to the complaint, which was filed Monday under seal.

It does seem that a disproportionate number of these interstate terrorist types come from Texas, huh?

Unrest flared throughout Minneapolis following Floyd’s death, which was captured on a bystander’s cellphone video, causing Gov. Tim Walz to activate the Minnesota National Guard. As police clashed with protesters, Hunter and other members of the Boogaloo Bois discussed in private Facebook messages their plans to travel to Minneapolis and rally at the Cub Foods near the Third Precinct building, according to federal court documents. One of the people Hunter coordinated with posted publicly to social media: “Lock and load boys. Boog flags are in the air, and the national network is going off,” the complaint states.

Two hours after the police precinct was set on fire, Hunter texted with another Boogaloo member in California, a man named Steven Carrillo.

“Go for police buildings,” Hunter told Carrillo, according to charging documents.

And Carrillo has a bit of a story as well:

Five days later, Carrillo shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz when authorities tried to arrest him, according to charges filed in California. Authorities say he then stole a car and wrote “Boog” on the hood “in what appeared to be his own blood.”

A couple of days later, during police protests in Austin, Texas, police pulled over a truck after seeing three men in tactical gear and carrying guns drive away in it. Hunter, in the front passenger seat, wore six loaded banana magazines for an AK-47-style assault rifle on his tactical vest, according federal authorities. The two other men had AR-15 magazines affixed to their vests. The officers found an AK-47-style rifle and two AR-15 rifles on the rear seat of the vehicle, a pistol next to the driver’s seat and another pistol in the center console.

Hunter denied he owned any of the weapons found in the vehicle. He did, according to the complaint, volunteer that he was the leader of the Boogaloo Bois in South Texas and that he was present in Minneapolis when the Third Precinct was set on fire. Police seized the guns and let Hunter and the others go.

Once again, we see the cops sghowing favoritism to white supremacist terrorists, even though these same terrorists are the ones who are disproportionately likely to kill cops.

Thin blue line, my ass.

Hunter is the third member of the Boogaloo Bois, a loose-knit group intent on igniting a second American civil war, to be charged in Minneapolis as a result of the unrest that followed Floyd’s death.

Michael Robert Solomon and Benjamin Ryan Teeter were indicted in September with conspiracy to provide material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Mom’s Yahrzeit Today

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She died in 1976 in a car accident.  She was 39.

It was a drunk driver.

I don’t know the driver’s name, or what happened to him in court, but I hope that he did something useful with his life.

My mom was a serious bad-ass, at least to the degree that a 4’11” tall woman with juvenile onset rheumatoid arthritis can be. (Trust me, that’s a LOT)

I really wish that I had inherited her singing voice.

All the News That’s Fit to Print, Huh?

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It seems to be a routine thing. Some New York Times reporter goes on safari and conduct man on the street interviews, and many of these so-called “Ordinary Folk” are actually Republican operatives.

This happens over, and over, and over again.

This is not accidental.  This is baked into the culture: 

The New York Times has been caught, once again, passing off Republican operatives as “regular” Republican voters in an article intended to show how effectively Trump is maintaining his support.

It raises serious questions about whether Times editor and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign’s propaganda.

In the latest case, an article posted on Wednesday headlined “Around Atlanta, Many White Suburbanites Are Sticking With Trump” by Times national reporter Elaina Plott initially misidentified two of the four allegedly run-of-the-mill voters who supported the article’s thesis: That Trump’s unfounded fear-mongering along the lines that “ANTIFA THUGS WILL RUIN THE SUBURBS!” is working.

The lead anecdote came courtesy of Natalie Pontius, who was simply identified as “an interior decorator, married with two children and a University of Georgia alumna.”

………

Pontius, it turns out, was a paid political consultant for a Republican candidate for Georgia’s House of Representatives in 2018.

Plott also quoted Jake Evans, initially identified simply as “an attorney in Atlanta.”

………

Evans, it turns out, chairs the state’s branch of the Republican National Lawyers Association, is the immediate past president of the Atlanta Young Republicans, is a member of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s election-security task force — and he’s the son of Randy Evans, a Republican heavy-hitter rewarded by Trump with a cushy gig as ambassador to Luxembourg.

And this isn’t the first Times story like this to feature ringers. In a notorious June 2018 story by political reporter Jeremy Peters – headlined “As Critics Assail Trump, His Supporters Dig In Deeper,” the supposedly ordinary Republican woman in the lead anecdote turned out to be a board member of an ultra-conservative PAC.

………

Because the fact that the reporter couldn’t find real people to support its thesis suggests that she was assigned to produce precisely the story she did. (So does the URL, which I suspect reflects the editor’s original “slug” for the story: “atlanta-trump-voters-women.”)

………

This, I’m afraid, is Dean Baquet’s newsroom in a nutshell, where the anachronistic notion of “objectivity” is horribly misapplied to produce both-sides stenography instead of calling out liars and racists.

………

Going forward, readers deserve to know exactly how the reporters found their way to the “average” people they quote, to judge for themselves how typical or atypical they may be. How many people did the reporters talk to before they found the person they needed for their story? What questions did they ask?

And finally, I need to bring up a point I’ve made repeatedly before: Simply quoting Trump supporters who mouth crazy talking points (whether they’re ringers or not) is a terrible disservice to the reader.

………

The hero in this story is Charles Bethea, a New Yorker staff writer — and Twitter.

Bethea quickly recognized Jake Evans:

Here’s my 2018 mini-profile of Jake Evans, who is very much not a man-on-the-street. (Side note: Evans told me he was 31 years old in January of 2018, and NYT says he’s still 31 years old today. Not sure how that works.) https://t.co/jdfm4xmWdG

— Charles.Bethea (@charlesbethea) October 21, 2020

That’s because Bethea had actually written a short profile of Evans for the New Yorker in 2018, when Evans was president of the Atlanta Young Republicans.

Eventually, after sleuthing by Zach Kopplin, an investigator for the Government Accountability Project, and Georgia attorney Eric Teusink, Bethea also announced:

Wow: Natalie Pontius was a paid political consultant for a Republican candidate for GA House of Reps in 2018.
Yet she remains in the shortened but still misleading @nytimes story about voting in GA, described only as “an interior decorator” & UGA alumna. https://t.co/aBYhvmgJ0G https://t.co/c5UbZS8L4y pic.twitter.com/0leSKTCUeI

— Charles.Bethea (@charlesbethea) October 23, 2020

Seriously, there is something very toxic in the New York Times newsroom, and while Dean Baquet makes the problem worse, as an institution, it has rot at its bones.

The “Gray Lady” keeps screwing up these stories because senior editors send reporters into the field with the mission to serve predetermined narrative, and reporters know that.

Guilty as Hell, and Stupid

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But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a Texas Republican, so it come with the territory.

He has now begun retaliating against the senior staff who reported him to the authorities, and firing two whistle-blowers, and stripping authority from 2 others:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has sidelined four of the seven senior aides who weeks ago told law enforcement they believed Paxton had committed bribery and abuse of office — firing two and placing two more on leave — in what employment attorneys say looks like a clear act of retaliation against legally protected whistleblowers.

The aides, who represented a large share of the agency’s most senior staff, alerted law enforcement and then agency human resources that they believed Paxton was using the power of his office to serve a political donor, Austin real estate developer Nate Paul. The agency had taken the unusual step of weighing in on a lawsuit that involved Paul, and Paxton personally hired an outside investigator — in a process aides called highly suspect — to vet the donor’s complaints

Ian Prior, a spokesperson for Paxton’s campaign, denied Friday that the personnel decisions had anything to do with their accusations against Paxton.

………

Mark Penley, the deputy attorney general for criminal justice, was put on leave weeks ago, shortly after reporting Paxton to law enforcement, top aides have said. And Jeff Mateer, who worked for years as Paxton’s top deputy, resigned earlier this month after accusing his boss of running afoul of the law.

A sixth employee, Director of Law Enforcement David Maxwell, was also placed on leave earlier this month. Maxwell did not sign on to the whistleblowers’ Oct. 1 letter to human resources, which stated they had “a good faith belief that the Attorney General is violating federal and/or state law.” But he was involved in the investigation that sparked the mutiny against Paxton — and Paxton has slammed Maxwell for his work on the case.

These whistle-blowers were close political allies of Paxton, and the depth of his corruption has been an open secret in Texas for years.