An Ohio city is trying to use the state’s Marsy’s Law—intended to protect the rights of crime victims—to demand a man pay them back the costs of sending police to respond to a false 911 call.
Back in April 2018, Michael Knab dialed 911 from his home in Centerville, Ohio, telling a police dispatcher that there was an active shooter there and that somebody had been shot. There was no shooter. Police searched the home and didn’t even find any firearms. According to a court report of the case, witnesses said Knab had been smoking meth and was hallucinating. A friend who was temporarily living at the home also testified that Knab had mild schizophrenia.
Knab was subsequently charged and convicted of filing a false police report and misusing a 911 system. But the city didn’t stop there. Centerville claimed that as a “victim” of a crime—Knab’s false 911 call—the city was entitled to financial restitution under the state’s Marsy’s Law. It wanted Knab to pay back $1,375.56 to the Centerville Police Department for the cost of responding to the call.
Knab is resisting. He appealed both his conviction (arguing that he genuinely believed he was in danger when he called 911) and the demands for restitution. The courts have upheld his conviction but the Court of Appeals for Ohio’s Second Appellate District in Montgomery County has tossed out the restitution demands. The court ruled that while a city can be a victim of crimes like embezzlement and vandalism, government agencies cannot be considered “victims” of crimes that they’re responding to in an official capacity. It cannot demand restitution simply for the cost of responding to calls based on the wording of the law.
Centerville asked the Ohio Supreme Court to take the case and reconsider the lower court’s ruling. The court has said it will consider the question of whether a municipality can qualify as a “victim” under Marsy’s Law.
This conflict is a result of one of the top criticisms of Marsy’s Laws—they’re vague about what constitutes a victim, and therefore leave open the possibility of any number of unusual claims for financial restitution. The Ohio Marsy’s Law expands the definition of victim to include “a person against whom the criminal offense or delinquent act is committed or who is directly and proximately harmed by the commission of the offense or act.”
The second part of this definition has set off any number of alarm bells from critics. Who is to decide who is “directly and proximately harmed” by a crime? Municipalities insist that pretty much every crime from drug use to homelessness causes the municipality economic harm. What would stop Centerville from demanding restitution from defendants for every crime that requires police intervention? If this restitution demand is upheld, doesn’t this both discourage people from calling 911 and potentially encourage police to arrest people who do if they decide the calls weren’t serious enough?
The American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio has submitted an amicus brief supporting Knab’s claim. And last week, the editorial board of The Columbus Dispatch took a formal position opposing Centerville’s demand for restitution. It warns that “allowing cities to collect money as ‘crime victims’ would create an unhealthy incentive for local governments to file criminal charges and would put them in competition with true victims for restitution dollars.”
More about the unintended consequences of victims’ rights laws here.
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The odds of a brokered convention are greater than most think.
Six Significant Changes
The superdelegates do not get to vote in the first round this year unless a candidate has a majority. Unlike 2016 when they all went to Hillary, this year they don’t vote until round 2 unless it is already decided.
California is now part of Super Tuesday. In 2016, the California primary was held on June 7. This year, the survivor bias bandwagon effect will be significantly reduced and possibly eliminated.
Following NH there will be two debates, and likely 4 candidates minimum at each. Currently there are six.
This will likely not be a two-way races headed into Super-Tuesday. Elizabeth Warren may have little overall chance, but she does have a chance of getting 15% in many states.
Progressive Split: Bernie Sanders are battling each other for the Progressives. Bernie will get most of this vote, but Warren will likely have have enough money to stay in until the end if she wants.
Bloomberg and Steyer may target a couple of states hard: Texas, Colorado perhaps? They may each pull 15% in a couple of them.
1: Superdelegates
One of the rule changes since 2016 is that superdelegates (uncommitted) cannot vote in the first round unless there is already a clear majority.Specifically
If a single candidate wins at least 2,268 pledged delegates: Superdelegates will be allowed to vote at first ballot, as their influence can not overturn the majority of pledged delegates.
If a single candidate wins 1,886–2,267 pledged delegates: Superdelegates will be barred from voting at first ballot, which solely will be decided by the will of pledged delegates.
If no candidate wins more than 1,885 pledged delegates: This will result in a contested convention, where superdelegates are barred from voting at the first formal ballot, but regain their right to vote for their preferred presidential nominee for all subsequent ballots needed until the delegates reach a majority.
In 2016 Sanders supporters howled, and correctly so, about superdelegate bias for Hillary.
This change alone increases the chances of a brokered convention.
2: Super Tuesday Changes
Compared to 2016, California adds 494 delegates. North Carolina adds 122 delegates. Maine adds 32. And Georgia subtracts 120.
That is a net new 528 delegates that will have at least some survivor bandwagon bias removed.
By survivor bias, I mean increasing the tendency of people to vote for winners as the campaign progresses.
As noted above, the California primary in 2016 was held on June 7. This is a very significant change.
3: Debate Schedule
Six are qualified for the next set of debates.
Billionaire Tom Steyer just qualified. He joins Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar.
There will be two Democratic debates following the New Hampshire primary. The rules will change then, but we do not yet know how.
Those 4-way to 6-way debates can easily take momentum from whoever wins Iowa and New Hampshire.
4: Not a 2-Way Race
The DNC was hoping to narrow the field to two or three. Nope. This will not be a 2016 repeat of Hillary vs Bernie.
Warren is likely to get 15% in many states and might even win Massachusetts.
5: Progressive Split
Bernie is a very strong favorite to beat Warren in the battle for the progressives.
But she has a dedicated following and might easily take 15% of the vote in many states.
Also Warren is good at fundraising. She will likely last to the end.
Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg are both billionaires. They can self-finance to the end if so desired.
Steyer is highly unlikely to win any states let alone the nomination, but he could easily disrupt South Carolina enough so there is not much momentum for any candidate headed into Super Tuesday.
Bloomberg could conceivably win New York and do very well in Texas on Super Tuesday. By very well I mean 15% or better.
Republicans have winner-take-all rules in some states but the Democrats generally have some sort of proportional allocation, typically with a 15% threshold.
In California, 35% of the votes are statewide, the rest by district.
Of the pledged delegates, 90 are at-large (statewide) delegates. Another 54 are pledged party leaders (mayors, legislators, state officials, etc.) committed to candidates who get at least 15% of the vote.
(90+54)/416 = 35%
Of the pledged delegates, 326 are allocated by district. The 15% rule comes into play, but at the district level.
Let’s run the above math based on a hypothetical California poll that has Bernie at 24%, Warren at 21%, and Biden at 20%.
I am told the poll is real, but there is no reporting on it that I can find.
California Statewide Math
24 + 21 + 20 = 65
Sanders would get 24/65ths of the statewide delegates (37%)
Warren would get 21/65ths of the statewide delegates (32%)
Biden would get 20/65ths of the statewide delegates (31%)
Sanders would get 33 statewide delegates.
Warren would get 29 statewide delegates.
Biden would get 28 statewide delegates.
Those are the statewide allocations.
Pledged Delegate District Math
Sanders would get 24% minimum of 326 district delegates.
Warren would get 21% minimum of 326 district delegates.
Biden would get 20% minimum of 326 district delegates.
Those are approximations for two reasons.
Although there is a 15% minimum, that also applies at the district level. It’s possible that Sanders, Warren, or Biden would not get 15% in every district.
It is also possible some candidates get 15% in some districts without hitting the 15% statewide threshold.
Consider the possibility Buttigieg got 15% in half the districts but only 11% statewide. In that case he would get about 7.5% of the 326 or 24 delegates.
Super Tuesday
Someone is going to “win” but that someone may only have 35-45% of the delegates.
Would that be enough to cause winner bias to kick in?
I don’t know. Nor does anyone else. But I doubt it.
Projections
Project similar three-way splits across Texas, Illinois, Florida, and New York.
Guess what?
You have no overall winner and thus a “Brokered Convention” even if Bloomberg does not win New York or Warren win Massachusetts.
How Likely?
A brokered convention may seem unlikely, and probably is, but unlikely does not mean zero.
Should it come to a brokered convention, Warren’s delegates would likely go to Bernie.
And expect massive howls if Bernie were to have more delegates in round one but lost to Biden when the superdelegates kicked in.
Some say it is too early to be discussing such things, but I would rather discuss this now and throw it away than be in a mad rush to figure everything out at the last minute on Super Tuesday.
Low odds does not mean no odds. I suspect the odds right now are at least 15% and perhaps way higher.
One of the most frequent arguments that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) makes in favor of single-payer health care is that other countries have universal, government-financed health care systems, so the United States should be able to have them as well. This is often declared with a sort of grumpy indignation, as if the existence of other systems is the final word in any debate on the issue. It is not really an argument so much as a declaration that single-payer is easy, and there is no real argument to be had.
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise to see the following Sanders tweet show up in my timeline this morning:
Don't tell me the United States cannot implement a Medicare for All system to guarantee health care to every man, woman and child.
What’s notable about this tweet, however, is that Sanders links to a feature-length report by Vox‘s Dylan Scott on how Taiwan converted to a single-payer system in the 1990s. Scott’s piece is smart, thorough, and sharply observed, and I’d encourage everyone to read it—because, if anything, it shows just how difficult implementing and sustaining a single-payer system would probably be, even under relatively favorable conditions.
As a newly formed democracy, Taiwan worked with well-known health policy scholar and single-payer advocate Uwe Reinhardt (who died in 2017) to build its system, which relies on a government-run insurance system to finance the majority—though not all—of the country’s health care. Some private insurance is available to cover additional benefits.
As is often the case with government-run health care systems, the country determined that cost-control measures would be necessary, so it set up a system of relatively modest premiums and copayments. Eventually, at Reinhardt’s recommendation, the system converted to “global budgets” in which the government negotiates payments for providers based on a capped amount of total spending.
Already, the differences between Taiwan’s system and the Sanders plan are apparent: Sanders’ Medicare for All bill calls for no copays and no premiums and effectively outlaws private insurance as we know it. It is substantially more generous than Taiwan’s system, which means it would be substantially more expensive.
Yet one of the big themes of Scott’s piece is that Taiwan’s health care providers believe their system is too generous to patients. Even with copayments and premiums in place, Taiwan’s patients heavily utilize the system. This, Scott writes, has “predictable downsides: Hospitals get crowded in Taiwan. The capacity of health care providers to attend to everyone in need can be stretched pretty thin.” As a result, some patients face long lines, and limited access to expensive treatments.
Doctors and other health care providers are frequently exhausted and have a much less favorable view of the system than the rest of the public. “I believe we are too kind to our patient[s],” a health economics professor at National Taiwan University told Scott, “which is not a good thing, actually.” Health officials believe that the copayments and premiums are, if anything, too low; one top health official said he planned to propose increasing them following an election.
Taiwan’s system, in other words, is less generous and less radical than the system Sanders has campaigned on. And unlike the United States, which has a vast and complex network of health care providers and public and private financing, Taiwan started from something like a blank slate—without the embedded complexities and pathologies of the American system.
Yet in the quarter-century it has existed, Taiwan’s health care system has nonetheless struggled with sustainable financing and utilization issues. And it has pitted doctors against patients, resulting in overworked caregivers and pressure to raise costs on individual users.
Although Scott notes that in Taiwan, these difficulties “aren’t treated as an indictment of national health insurance,” they should certainly serve as a caution tale for anyone thinking of trying out a similar system here in the United States, where aggressive cost-control measures often fail, and where health care providers have considerable political power—in part because they have the trust and backing of the public.
Indeed, before he died, none other than Uwe Reinhardt, the health policy expert who helped design Taiwan’s system, warned that single-payer probably wouldn’t work in the United States. “I have not advocated the single-payer model here,” he told Ezra Klein, then of The Washington Post, “because our government is too corrupt.” Doctors and providers, he argued, have too much political power.
There are inherent limits to the ability of one country to adopt another country’s system; Taiwan’s system probably tells us more about how a similar system in the United States would struggle than it does about how it would “surely” succeed. As Klein observed “Reinhardt’s argument is a reminder that the simple fact that a policy worked in another country does not mean it will work in this country.” It’s a useful reminder—and one that Bernie Sanders could stand to hear.
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An Ohio city is trying to use the state’s Marsy’s Law—intended to protect the rights of crime victims—to demand a man pay them back the costs of sending police to respond to a false 911 call.
Back in April 2018, Michael Knab dialed 911 from his home in Centerville, Ohio, telling a police dispatcher that there was an active shooter there and that somebody had been shot. There was no shooter. Police searched the home and didn’t even find any firearms. According to a court report of the case, witnesses said Knab had been smoking meth and was hallucinating. A friend who was temporarily living at the home also testified that Knab had mild schizophrenia.
Knab was subsequently charged and convicted of filing a false police report and misusing a 911 system. But the city didn’t stop there. Centerville claimed that as a “victim” of a crime—Knab’s false 911 call—the city was entitled to financial restitution under the state’s Marsy’s Law. It wanted Knab to pay back $1,375.56 to the Centerville Police Department for the cost of responding to the call.
Knab is resisting. He appealed both his conviction (arguing that he genuinely believed he was in danger when he called 911) and the demands for restitution. The courts have upheld his conviction but the Court of Appeals for Ohio’s Second Appellate District in Montgomery County has tossed out the restitution demands. The court ruled that while a city can be a victim of crimes like embezzlement and vandalism, government agencies cannot be considered “victims” of crimes that they’re responding to in an official capacity. It cannot demand restitution simply for the cost of responding to calls based on the wording of the law.
Centerville asked the Ohio Supreme Court to take the case and reconsider the lower court’s ruling. The court has said it will consider the question of whether a municipality can qualify as a “victim” under Marsy’s Law.
This conflict is a result of one of the top criticisms of Marsy’s Laws—they’re vague about what constitutes a victim, and therefore leave open the possibility of any number of unusual claims for financial restitution. The Ohio Marsy’s Law expands the definition of victim to include “a person against whom the criminal offense or delinquent act is committed or who is directly and proximately harmed by the commission of the offense or act.”
The second part of this definition has set off any number of alarm bells from critics. Who is to decide who is “directly and proximately harmed” by a crime? Municipalities insist that pretty much every crime from drug use to homelessness causes the municipality economic harm. What would stop Centerville from demanding restitution from defendants for every crime that requires police intervention? If this restitution demand is upheld, doesn’t this both discourage people from calling 911 and potentially encourage police to arrest people who do if they decide the calls weren’t serious enough?
The American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio has submitted an amicus brief supporting Knab’s claim. And last week, the editorial board of The Columbus Dispatch took a formal position opposing Centerville’s demand for restitution. It warns that “allowing cities to collect money as ‘crime victims’ would create an unhealthy incentive for local governments to file criminal charges and would put them in competition with true victims for restitution dollars.”
More about the unintended consequences of victims’ rights laws here.
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30 Year Boeing Quality Manager Says “Fly Something Else”, Refuses To Fly On 787 Dreamliner
Slipping through the cracks of the Boeing controversy – which has taken on new twists and turns almost daily – were comments we recently uncovered by a former Boeing quality manager, who said last month that he thinks Boeing’s problems aren’t just limited to the 737.
John Barnett was a quality manager for Boeing for 30 years before he was transferred to South Carolina to work on the 787, according to Big Think.
It was there that a new leadership team who had previously worked on Boeing’s military projects began overseeing work on the commercial airliner.
Barnett says that team lowered safety standards significantly. He stated: “They started pressuring us to not document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non-conforming parts — they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring.”
At first, it was just administrative issues, Barnett said. But then, it got worse.
“Over time it got worse and worse. They began to ignore defective parts installed on the planes and basic issues related to aircraft safety,” he said.
According to Barnett, one audit uncovered that 25% of oxygen masks didn’t work. Defective parts were getting lost in the system before being discovered flying on aircraft. Barnett says he remembered “several defective bulkheads being installed without having been repaired.”
He also said that there was an issue with metal slivers. 3-inch-long slivers of razor-sharp metal would fall into areas where planes have sensitive wiring and electronics, he said.
He continued: “That surface below the floor board is where all of your flight control wires are, that’s where all of your electronic equipment is. It controls systems on the airplane, it controls the power of the airplane. All of your electronic equipment is down where all of these metal slivers are falling.”
He said these slivers would cause shorts and fires at the plant. As planes vibrate, these metal slivers work their way into wire bundles and can cause issues during flights, he said. Barnett filed complaints with multiple members of the Boeing team, which he said led to his reassignment to a department that isolated him.
The FAA performed an audit substantiating his claims and even telling Boeing that no more planes could be delivered with those metal slivers. Meanwhile, 800 planes that include them have already been delivered and Boeing felt customers didn’t need to be informed.
“Every 787 out there has these slivers out there,” Barnett said.
Barnett also filed a complaint with OSHA, which is reportedly still under investigation.
He concluded: “…as far as the 787, I would change flights before I would fly a 787. I’ve told my family — please don’t fly a 787. Fly something else. Try to get a different ticket. I want the people to know what they are riding on.”
Aramco has exercised the greenshoe option attached to its initial public offering, issuing another 450 million shares to raise an additional $3.8 billion, the company said as quoted by CNN.
As a result, the already record-breaking IPO of the Saudi energy giant has been pushed up to a total $29.4 billion.
Aramco listed 3 billion of its shares on the Tadawul exchange in early December and quickly touched the much-hyped $2-trillion valuation Crown Prince Mohammed was after when he decided to list a minority stake in the company.
After that, however, the shares retreated, and last week took a nosedive on the renewed tension between the United States and Iran, which indirectly threatens the security of Saudi oil supply due to its proximity to Iran and the mutual hostility between the two largest countries in the Middle East.
The greenshoe option, as CNN’s Claire Duffy notes in her report on the news, is commonly used by issuers to keep the stock from falling below the issuing price. This, however, is not the case with Aramco. The additional shares were allocated to buyers before the listing and they will not be floated on Tadawul.
Even so, the stock was down by 10 percent since the listing…
The top concern among investors is geopolitical right now, but this can change when the holding period instituted by the Saudi government for retail investors expires. The holding period is meant to prevent a quick selloff the moment Aramco’s share price rises enough to be turned into a fat profit. Once it expires, six months after the listing, a selloff may still happen.
Meanwhile, some analysts are still wondering how the Kingdom’s oil giant will ease foreign investors’ concerns about transparency and corporate governance risk, considering that Saudi Arabia’s rulers will continue to call the shots. Yet these concerns would only come to the fore if Aramco decides to go through with an international listing, for which it is in no hurry.
The White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a nonprofit opposed to tax-funded animal testing, is suing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) following its failure to provide the group with records related to the department’s experiments on primates.
WCW had submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records requests seeking videos, photographs, and animal welfare reports related to studies performed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is housed within HHS, on monkeys.
WCW filed two records requests with the NIH in June and September 2019. In both cases, according to WCW’s lawsuit, staff at the NIH first attempted to negotiate the release of the requested records before they stopped responding to WCW emails altogether.
The group filed its lawsuit in December, claiming HHS had failed to comply with FOIA.
“There is a very troubling lack of transparency and accountability about how the NIH is spending its money,” says Justin Goodman of WCW. “We’re confident that this lawsuit will shed some light on how tax dollars are being spent so the public can judge for itself if it wants bureaucrats to give monkeys brain damage and show them pictures of fruit.”
The NIH declined a request for comment, citing the pending litigation.
Goodman says that WCW obtained information about these experiments on primates from public records requests, grant applications, and published NIH studies. He claims the government has spent some $100 million on monkey experiments since the Carter administration.
Science reports that the NIH owns 7,000 monkeys, and has increased its use of these animals in research “involving pain and distress” by 50 percent since 2014.
The 2020 spending bill passed in December included a provision requiring the NIH to inform Congress about its efforts to find alternatives to primate testing.
“Taxpayers are sick and tired of the government’s multimillion-dollar monkey business, like giving primates brain damage and then scaring them with rubber snakes and spiders,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), who helped sponsor that legislation, told the Washington Examiner, calling the NIH’s monkey experiments “expensive, unnecessary, and inhumane.”
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The White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a nonprofit opposed to tax-funded animal testing, is suing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) following its failure to provide the group with records related to the department’s experiments on primates.
WCW had submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records requests seeking videos, photographs, and animal welfare reports related to studies performed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is housed within HHS, on monkeys.
WCW filed two records requests with the NIH in June and September 2019. In both cases, according to WCW’s lawsuit, staff at the NIH first attempted to negotiate the release of the requested records before they stopped responding to WCW emails altogether.
The group filed its lawsuit in December, claiming HHS had failed to comply with FOIA.
“There is a very troubling lack of transparency and accountability about how the NIH is spending its money,” says Justin Goodman of WCW. “We’re confident that this lawsuit will shed some light on how tax dollars are being spent so the public can judge for itself if it wants bureaucrats to give monkeys brain damage and show them pictures of fruit.”
The NIH declined a request for comment, citing the pending litigation.
Goodman says that WCW obtained information about these experiments on primates from public records requests, grant applications, and published NIH studies. He claims the government has spent some $100 million on monkey experiments since the Carter administration.
Science reports that the NIH owns 7,000 monkeys, and has increased its use of these animals in research “involving pain and distress” by 50 percent since 2014.
The 2020 spending bill passed in December included a provision requiring the NIH to inform Congress about its efforts to find alternatives to primate testing.
“Taxpayers are sick and tired of the government’s multimillion-dollar monkey business, like giving primates brain damage and then scaring them with rubber snakes and spiders,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), who helped sponsor that legislation, told the Washington Examiner, calling the NIH’s monkey experiments “expensive, unnecessary, and inhumane.”
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First Case Of SARS-Like Pneumonia Reported Outside China As Scientists Scramble To Develop New Test
The World Health Organization has confirmed that a woman traveling from China to Thailand is infected with a SARS-like mystery virus at the heart of an outbreak in Wuhan.
An image of the new SARS-like coronavirus (Photo: GISAID)
The woman was hospitalized January 8, making it the first confirmed case of the new coronavirus detected outside China.
“The possibility of cases being identified in other countries was not unexpected, and reinforces why WHO calls for ongoing active monitoring and preparedness in other countries,” the WHO said in a statement.
In total, 41 people have been diagnosed with the new virus, while a 61-year-old man has died according to the Wuhan municipal health commission. Seven patients have been discharged while six remain in critical condition, reports The Guardian.
Meanwhile, a team of Hong Kong experts few to Wuhan on Monday to meet with health officials as seven suspected cases have been reported in the city across six hospitals. All had been to the mainland city of Wuhan in the past two weeks, after which they developed a fever, respiratory infection or pneumonia symptoms. Of note, none of them had visited the meat markets linked to the outbreak.
The Hong Kong Center for Health Protection confirmed on Sunday that China’s National Health Commission had shared the genetic sequence for the new coronavirus with the World Health Organization, as scientists scramble to develop a test for the strain.
In a statement, the center said that relevant institutions had uploaded the genetic sequence into an online database called GISAID, which “is cross-checking the information and will publish it upon completion.”
“The [Center’s] Public Health Laboratory Services Branch … as one of the users [of the genetic database], will obtain the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus. While [the branch] is conducting molecular testing for a number of coronaviruses, it will develop specific tests based on the information of the new sequence,” the announcement continues.
According to SCMP, genetically sequencing viruses is a useful technique to assist in understanding the nature of disease, and will allow for custom-tailored diagnostics that can quickly identify illnesses and relevant care as outbreaks unfold.
The New York Timesreports that GRU operatives launched a successful “phishing attack” on the Ukrainian gas company at the heart of scandalous allegations about Joe Biden, and establishment pundits are falling all over themselves to tweet the hottest take on this exciting new Russia conspiracy.
The article also of course lacks any hard evidence for its claims, and is of course completely silent on any details as to how the security firm knows that the alleged hackers were both (A) Russian and (B) tied to the Russian government. This is par for course with mass media news reporting on anything negative about Russia, where all journalistic standards have gone out the window and nobody suffers any professional consequences for even the most egregious misreporting on that nation.
And, naturally, liberal pundits are guzzling it down like Mike Pompeo left alone at the table with the gravy boat.
Thanks to editor of another establishment “news” organization for being so mindblowingly & transparently corrupt that even I can see through you.
Here our establishment errand boy warns that any true information about Joe & Hunter Biden’s corruption is Russian Disinformation https://t.co/YF3oLnScSd
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a man trying to run with an erection, but FYI it’s the most ridiculous-looking thing you can possibly ever witness. And the mad scramble of conservative Democrats to say something viral about this new angle on an entirely exhausted theme puts one in the mind of a whole platoon of men running completely tumescent at full sprint.
“I hope my fellow editors will think hard — really hard, a lot harder than they did in 2016 — before publishing any material hacked by the Russians,”tweeted editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast Noah Shachtman in response to the NYT report.
It is very revealing that the head of a major mainstream publication believes news outlets should sit on a story exposing the corruption of a leading presidential candidate — no matter how newsworthy — if it’s believed to have come from “the Russians”. How many major stories are being spiked for no other reason than a loyalty to the US government’s geopolitical agendas against noncompliant nations, exactly?
Yet sentiments identical to Shachtman’s are currently being bleated by like-minded pundits throughout the Twitterverse right now.
“Me and Oliver Darcy took at look at this a year ago… newsrooms hadn’t a lot to say about it. Not a lot of self-reflection, it seems,” tweeted CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan in response to Shachtman’s post. “Hackers could target the 2020 election. How will newsrooms respond if they release stolen data?”
“Russians working hard for President Trump’s reelection: mainstream media do not need to collaborate with the Russians again and breathlessly promote their non-newsworthy findings, as they did in 2016,” economist David Rothschild tweeted, without specifying his peculiar definition of “non-newsworthy”.
“Will the media run info from national security hacks as blockbuster stories like in 2016? That’s the million-dollar question,” tweetedMichigan Advance editor-in-chief Susan Demas.
This might be the most important news of the day. Russia could leak Burisma emails, and slip in some doctored emails, to harm Biden later on, if he is the Democratic nominee. The 2016 playbook all over again. https://t.co/w0p7pXjWgp
A CNN reporter took it up even further, preemptively speculating based on literally nothing that any evidence of Biden’s corruption which emerges from the phishing campaign will have been “doctored” by Russia.
“Russia could leak Burisma emails, and slip in some doctored emails, to harm Biden later on, if he is the Democratic nominee,” tweeted CNN’s Marshall Cohen. “The 2016 playbook all over again.”
This insanity was seconded and then ratcheted up even further by MSNBC’s Malcolm Nance, whose main job seems to be to push the Overton window of Russia hysteria toward the craziest end of the spectrum.
“DNC 2.0,” Nance wrote. “To protect Trump the GRU will manufacture and insert Black propaganda, fake emails in a data base Burisma emails to implicate Biden and support Trump. They don’t care if you believe it … it’s all to get Trump to believe it. He’ll destroy America to win.”
DNC 2.0. To protect Trump the GRU will manufacture & insert Black propaganda, fake emails in a data base Burisma emails to implicate Biden & support Trump. They don’t care if you believe it … it’s all to get Trump to believe it. He’ll destroy America to win. #NoGreaterTraitorhttps://t.co/LgZeAwa9fK
MSNBC analyst and former Obama administration official Richard Stengel, who has openly stated that he endorses the US government propagandizing its citizens, seized on the opportunity offered by this lawless feeding frenzy to advance a completely baseless Russiagate theory, because why the hell not?
“‘Russia, if you’re listening, hack Burisma.’ GRU has done same thing to this Ukrainian firm that they did to DNC,” tweeted Stengel. “If Trump asked Zelensky on a public call to investigate the Bidens, what do you suppose he asked Putin on a private call? Vlad, do me a favor.”
“More evidence that Putin fears Biden and is actively trying to help Trump,” added the Obama administration’s Michael McFaul. “Not good. All who believe in American sovereignty should denounce, Democrats and Republicans alike.”
“I’ll say it now: I don’t care WHAT the emails say. If he’s the guy, he’s got my vote. PERIOD,” tweeted popular #Resistance pundit Brooklyn Dad Defiant in what could generously be described as a very odd confession.
Here we go again, a Russian hacking playbook right out of 2016.
Russians hacked Burisma, and they’ll leak doctored emails on Biden if he’s the nominee.
I’ll say it now: I don’t care WHAT the emails say. If he’s the guy, he’s got my vote. PERIOD. https://t.co/qJhqNMecxR
There is at this time no legitimate reason to believe that the GRU was involved in any kind of cyberattack on Burisma, let alone that it found anything worth publishing. At the moment the only information we’ve gleaned from this incident is more insight into the fact that the news media environment of the most powerful nation on earth is deeply, profoundly unhealthy, and so are the individuals operating within it.
These are the people who shape the dominant narrative. These are the thought leaders, who really do lead the way a very large sector of the population thinks. We need to bring more consciousness to how wildly dysfunctional this is.
2020 has been wild already. And all signs indicate that it’s only going to get a whole lot crazier.
