YOU COULDN’T MAKE THIS UP IF YOU TRIED: A slight denouement on Ed Driscoll’s post about how President Biden might have more to answer for. Have a look-see at The Daily Mail’s story and the hellaciously ironic note on the video graphics…

Heh, “corrupted file.” 

I GOT TOOK, SORT OF: My apologies to InstaReaders who pointed out that the photo of Steven Colbert’s house in Montclair, NJ I posted yesterday is not accurate, and was instead a picture of the house in Caldwell, NJ used to film “The Sopranos.” My bad.
Drenched in shame, I researched it more fully, and here’s a pic of Colbert’s house: still pretty swank, a massive carbon footprint, and guess what? No solar panels.
So I’m still calling bullsh*t on this nonsense.

FILE UNDER SHOW-BIZ HYPOCRISY: The networks are virtue signaling as hard as they can, by creating this pablum. Meanwhile:

GET WOKE, GO BROKE– PART DEUX: I never blame someone for having a really stupid idea. I do blame a room full of executives who say “Yeah! Let’s do it!”

Without further ado, I present to you the latest and greatest attempt to monetize “social justice” and its invariable meltdown: “CBS Backtracks On ‘The Activist’ After A Backlash, Including From One Of Its Hosts.” My favorite part:

“Besides the fact that there will be millions of dollars spent on hair, makeup, travel, celebrity hosts and judges, production, distribution that could have gone to the activists and organizations that will be featured, this is deeply dangerous,” said Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an anti-police-violence activist whose organization, Campaign Zero, has helped shape police-reform efforts around the U.S., speaking on MSNBC.”

My second favorite part:

“This extends a societal belief about what a good activist looks like: someone who is ready for prime time, someone who fits a particular archetype and is great on social media and is perfectly marketable,” Cunningham said.”

FILE UNDER “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR“: Facebook and Ray-Ban announced that they are rolling out “smart” Wayfarers that have a built in camera, with a tiny lens capable of recording, well, just about anywhere. Where have we seen this before?Oh yeah…Google tried it a while back, and it turned out to be a very very bad idea. “Lots of people are comparing it to the failed disaster that was Google Glass (which gave rise to the term “Glassholes”).”

I remember “glassholes” being punched in the face in more than a few bars, and as Techdirt pointed out, Facebook’s attempt at limiting their liability is, well, stupid:

“[T]hey seem to think that they can stop people from covering the LED light that goes on when you’re recording… by claiming that it’s a terms of service violation. That’s what a Facebook VP told Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos, whose article on the whole Facebook glasses thing is absolutely worth reading. But this bit is just pure silliness and makes Facebook look ridiculous…”

But as always, the Law of Unintended Circumstances is going to bite more than a few Silicon Valley types right in the butt. Allow me to explain.

Many states (including California, Michigan and Florida) have “two-party consent” privacy laws that cover surreptitious recording, and usually the question will turn on “public interest” or “newsworthiness” (bye bye, Gawker) or whether instead the parties recorded without consent were in a place with a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Now here’s where it gets interesting.

For decades, the corporate media and their “say yes to anything” lawyers had convinced most courts that when sued on these laws, the location and circumstances of recording offered no such reasonable expectation. For example, in Desnick v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., media lawyers convinced Seventh Circuit Judge Gerald Posner, after undercover cameras were used to expose a crooked doctor that:

“The test patients [wearing hidden cameras contrary to Illinois law] entered offices that were open to anyone expressing a desire for ophthalmic services and videotaped physicians engaged in professional, not personal, communications with strangers (the testers themselves). The activities of the offices were not disrupted […] Nor was there any “invasion of a person’s private space.”

Ok, we get it. Let’s fast forward to 2019. The Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group, was determined to prove that Planned Parenthood was violating federal law and “selling” baby parts. So, like ABC News in Desnick, they sent in some people wired for video and sound, posing as potential purchasers of the “baby parts” to have lunch in a public restaurant to get Planned Parenthood staff to talk about financial arrangements. And talk they did. The undercover video shows Dr. Mary Gatter, the Planned Parenthood senior executive who infamously laughed “I want a Lamborghini” about payments for aborted fetal parts, again haggling over per-specimen pricing for livers, lungs, and brains.

Planned Parenthood went ballistic, and sued CMP in federal court in San Francisco, where the judge did a fair amount of mental gymnastics (“the cases […] consider contextual facts in addition to the fact that the recorded conversation was in a public and open space”) to hold that whether a conversation in a public restaurant was made with a “reasonable expectation of privacy” was a matter for a jury to decide. So off to a jury it went, where, unsurprisingly, the San Francisco jury found the CMP liable for more than $2 million in damages.

So what does all this have to do with GoogleGlass 2.0 and Facebook? This is where the Law of Unintended Consequences comes in. The corporate media put aside their “right to know” arguments used previously to record people surreptitiously, and sotto voce, cheered the result of the CMP case and a parallel criminal case pushed by Planned Parenthood. That’s all well and good, and frankly, I don’t care whether you are for or against abortion-on-demand. That’s your business.

But my business is safeguarding the public’s right to know about matters of public concern and seeing all the facts, especially regarding a 501(c)3 that essentially does its thing at the expense of the public fisc. The corporate media were eerily silent on the CMP case. When salacious headlines (and profit) can be had, corporate media has no problem at all weighing in, waving the flag and demanding the “right to know.” I have personally been involved in such “intervenor” motions, and have no shame in having done so. But the major corporate media and their law firms stayed silent here.

So the $64 question is: When some dope uploads a video made in a restaurant or bar  embarrassing another person, and yet more dopes at Buzzfeed, CNN, or The Washington Post republish that video without asking the most fundamental of questions, how can they get around — let alone dispute — the CMP opinion’s holding that it has to go to trial? The corporate media editors and their lawyers — generally smart people — missed the boat, and it seems sadly clear to me that their alleged vow to protect and defend the First Amendment is only contingent upon where in the political spectrum their bill-paying clients fall.

MORE FAKE BUT TRUE (Update Edition): Ed Driscoll highlighted the Zero Hedge post showing that Rolling Stone f*cked up again, never bothering to check with the hospital if the doctor making these claims even worked there. (He doesn’t). But why let the facts get in the way with a hot take that aligns with your readers’ narratives?

RS did not correct or retract. Instead they ran an “update” that shows the central premise of the story is wrong. This should have been spiked. You’d think after they committed journalistic suicide falling for the UVA rape hoax, they’d have learned their lesson.

HAS THE PENNY DROPPED FOR THE BBC? I’m not surprised by the sad facts of this matter, but I am surprised it got past the Political Correctness Team at the BBC:

“The attacker, a known supporter of Islamic State, was shot dead by police. He has now been identified as Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, a 32-year-old Tamil, who arrived in New Zealand in 2011 and sought refugee status […] Samsudeen had been arrested a number of times before Friday’s incident. But [Prime Minister] Ardern said that every legal avenue to keep him out of the community had been exhausted.”

Of course, the sway that the Pallywood Crowd holds over the UK press and elite is legendary. It was only a few years ago that the English village of Rotherham was exposed as a hotbed of misogyny of the worst kind, when Pakistani-born gangs of men abducted and raped more than 1,200 girls. Local government and much of the media were in full-blown politically correct denial that the gangs were almost all Pakistani Muslims. Criminologist Graham Hill wrote in 2020 that:

“The South Yorkshire police were scared to take action against a group of Asian men who were sexually abusing a young girl for fear of triggering unrest in the Asian community and being branded racist.”

Most of the UK press used the euphemism “asian” to describe them. And as we would later see here in the States this same dynamic works to the perpetrators’ advantage. Hill pointed out that:

“In 2011 Jack Straw, the former home secretary, suggested there was a cultural element to the then new phenomenon of “grooming gangs” and suggesting some men of Pakistani origin see white girls as “easy meat”. The former Blackburn Labour MP spoke out after two Asian men who abused girls in Derby were given indeterminate jail terms. At the time, he was quickly shouted down and labelled a racist.” (Emphasis added).

This is highly relevant today, as we watch the Taliban drag Afghanistan back into the 11th Century. The “Squad” continues to use this political correctness as a shield and sword when confronted on issues large and small. The question is whether House Democrats will finally start to distance themselves from knee-jerk bleating about “racism” and “islamophobia.” Every time the Taliban continue to further subjugate women, people ought to demand that the Democrats — including AOC, Tlaib, Omar and if he is coherent that day, the President– address the issue.
I’m not betting on much of a response.

JUST GAMING IT OUT: PJ Media and others reporting that Harris is suffering from “Havana Syndrome.” Here’s the exercise:

Not hoping it happens of course, but I’m gaming out a scenario where Harris has to step down before Biden for this mystery illness, Biden and Dems appoint a cogent and plausible Veep, giving Biden the room to step down at a later date and avoid the National Nightmare that a Harris Presidency would be.

This would be a great time to re-read Fletcher Knebel.

I’m just going to leave this here:

“WE PULLED THE PLUG, AND THEY COLLAPSED.” So says Ret. Army General Jack Keane, a retired American four-star general, former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. (Look him up: He’s a genuine badass).

The statement was made in a column published today by Judith Miller, a veteran correspondent with highly specialized expertise and experience in the Middle East. The takeaway from that column? “President Joe Biden spent much of his speech Monday blaming everyone else but himself and his administration for the foreign policy catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan” says Miller:

“Biden blamed the debacle on Barack Obama for having surged U.S. forces in Afghanistan to fend off the Taliban, Donald Trump for having negotiated a terrible deal with the Taliban committing American forces to leave precipitously by May 1—and, most egregiously, Afghans themselves for supposedly being unwilling to fend off the Taliban’s horrifying advance. Only a month ago, Biden justified his decision to abandon the Afghanistan effort by arguing that two decades of American military training and over $1 trillion in economic and military support had left the Afghan government and its military more than capable of defending their country; yesterday, he castigated Afghans for not being able to do so.”

Miller seems to be saying, like the rest of the nation except for a few sycophants, that Biden should have seen this coming. Using strategic analysis as a basis for her view, Miller continued:

“[T]he Afghan forces did not collapse on their own. Prior to President Trump’s strategically flawed deal with the Taliban, Afghan security forces and the Taliban had fought to a virtual military stalemate […] Neither could defeat the other. But the withdrawal of American air support and intelligence information regarding the disposition and strength of Taliban forces had severely affected the Afghan military, depressing Afghan capabilities and morale. So, too, did Biden’s closure of seven military bases in the height of the fighting season. “We pulled the plug and they collapsed,” said General Keane.”

It’s also worth noting that the sycophants trying to sell the “Trump’s fault” line glibly elide the fact that Biden has reversed dozens of Trump policies, from abortion to education to policing to oil pipelines. Yet this one just kind of slipped by him. And his defenders.

DENIAL AIN’T JUST A RIVER: They can spin it all they want, and some folks have bought the gaslight that “we never said defund the police” but the DNC needs to stop peeing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. There’s no viable, coherent — or honest — “but Trump” applicable here. Let pal Judy Miller explain in this interview.

Meanwhile, a screen grab above from this morning. This woman parked her car, turned on the 4-way blinkers, calmly walked out and blew the other woman’s brains out in broad daylight.

ABOUT SECTION 230: In an Instapundit item below, John Tierney links to a City Journal article that frames up “Big Tech Censorship” as the the most “controversial” problem with Section 230, which provides immunity to “internet service providers” for content ostensibly created by third parties.

While I agree that the censorship problem has to be solved by either a judicial ruling that declares the web a “public space” or a re-write of the statute, I think the real problem is that  the more common problem is an overly broad statute that allows virtual newsrooms to defame with impunity. The statute was passed in part to protect companies like AOL and CompuServe for content they didn’t create, particularly, kiddie porn.

One prescient court noted in the early years of digital space that:

“The internet (or ‘Net’), heralded as the most significant achievement in human speech since the printing press, has become ground zero in a legal battle over the First Amendment and the right of individuals to speak (or rather type) anonymously. At its best, the Net is the ultimate conduit for free speech and expression; at its worst, the Net can be a character assassin’s greatest weapon.”

The statute reads in relevant part:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The provision means that ISPs like AOL are not legally responsible for the defamatory postings of third parties. But neither are newsrooms, because the broad language of Section 230 defines “interactive computer service” as:

“The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.”

As much as I support protection for a free and vibrant press, allowing “breathing space” for good faith errors, the broad word “any” has been used to allow some pretty nasty stuff to be published, from Gawker to Occupy Democrats to Wikipedia.

If they are going to “fix” 230, they need to consider this.

GOOD IDEA, BUT BAD EXECUTION: JustTheNews has a report about Wisconsin state Sen. Julian Bradley (R-Franklin) proposing a new piece of legislation that would force the tech companies to show their algorithms and explain the policies that decide who gets blocked and who gets to post freely.

I’m all for it in concept, but Bradley makes in part, a fundamental error in saying:

“Bradley is quick to point out that judges have ruled lawmakers and other elected officials cannot block or ban people from commenting on their posts, even if those comments are negative or ugly. The courts have ruled, essentially, that social media is the new public town hall and some online speech is protected.”

Bradley’s error is reading the caselaw a little too broadly. The courts have not ruled essentially, that “social media is the new public town hall.” What they have ruled is that when public officials (be they Trump or AOC) use these platforms, their accounts are “official” government business and Freedom of Information or “Government in the Sunshine” laws, as well as the First Amendment prohibit blocking any segment of the public from reading those communiques. That’s not the same as declaring social media a “public square.”

Unless and until Congress drafts a law (or the Supreme Court rules, I suppose) declaring these platforms a “public square” the Tech Barons will still have filtering control. Given the current make-up of Congress, it inures to the Dems’ benefit to keep letting their donor Tech Barons filter out contrarian voices, so I would not look for this kind of law soon. For the record, I do think these platforms are already a de facto public square.

STILL THE SAME SWAMP CREATURES: Bloomberg News reporting yesterday that Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul made stock trades in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, just a week before the House Judiciary Committee advanced six bipartisan antitrust bills. The trade netted him a $4.8 million gain, and it’s risen to $5.3 million since then as the shares have jumped. What a lucky guy!

The laughable part is that Nancy (she’ll always be Granny Winebox to me), who presents herself as a strong, intelligent, worldly woman said through a spokesperson that:

“The speaker has no involvement or prior knowledge of these transactions,” her spokesman Drew Hammill said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.”

Don’t you love it when the most powerful woman in the world says “I don’t know nuthin'”?

THIS JUST IN: Remember Imran Awan, the horrible dirtbag who worked for horrible dirtbag Debbie Wasserstein-Schultz? Awan, an IT specialist accused of improper access to certain congressional computers, was arrested in July 2017 at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, as he tried to board a flight to Lahore, Pakistan. He had wiped his cellphones of any data, and federal agents found a résumé in the name of “Andrew Awan,” which they said suggested Awan planned to leave the country permanently, according to court documents.

Unsurprisingly, because then-President Trump tweeted about the case, the mainstream media took him up as a cause celebre, and they kept referring to a “conservative conspiracy” theory. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of fraud in a plea deal. All in all, some shady shit, given that:

Most Democratic lawmakers cut their ties with Awan and his family after the criminal investigation became public in early 2017. But Awan continued to be employed by Wasserman Schultz, although it’s unclear what his job duties were, given the fact that he had been barred from accessing the House IT system for months.

Fast forward to today. Horrible dirtbag Awan had filed a lawsuit against The Daily Caller and others, alleging all sorts of claims in libel, emotional distress, and what not. Today, D.C. Superior Court Judge Fern Sadler dismissed his complaint against The Daily Caller.

Order Granting in Part Defs’ Mots to Dismiss(256115651.1).

THE ANSWER IS “YES”, SHERLOCK: Did anti-Trump bias blind science to evidence for COVID lab-leak theory?

BREAKING: Feds subpoenaed Hunter Biden during 2016 election, raising worry over unpaid taxes on Ukraine work. JustTheNews is reporting that a newly discovered trove of emails shows that long before Trump was even elected, Hunter Biden and his associates were being investigated for Ukrainian monkey business:

“Emails written five years ago by Eric Schwerin, an executive inside the Rosemont Seneca business empire where Hunter Biden worked, shows there was about $1 million in personal income – about $400,000 in 2014 and $600,000 in 2015 — that the younger Biden had earned as a board member and consultant for Burisma that had not been fully covered by U.S. tax payments.”

The most important part (for me, anyway):

“Nothing was unethical,” Joe Biden declared during the last presidential debate of the 2020 campaign, referring to his son’s overseas business dealings. In fact, the email exchanges between Schwerin and the lawyers make clear Hunter Biden had failed to pay taxes on the Burisma money, something Ukraine’s chief prosecutor tried to bring to light to U.S. authorities starting in fall 2018.”

But of course, back then it was all about Trump being a Putin employee. And many brain-damaged people still believe this.

Another over-sold narrative bites the dust.

COOKIEPUSS! It’s weird, pointless, childish and maybe a little mean spirited. But it’s funny as all get-out…

FILE UNDER “HALF A LOAF IS BETTER THAN NONE”: California’s state constitution requires that the California Supreme Court review clemency requests by the Governor that involve twice-convicted felons. (“The Governor may not grant a pardon or commutation to a person twice convicted of a felony except on recommendation of the Supreme Court, 4 judges concurring.). You’d think in a state where it takes a lot to be arrested, tried, and convicted of a crime that’s a good thing.

But if you were Jerry Brown or Gavin Newsom, you’d think otherwise. Protecting criminals seems as important to them as protecting citizens and victims, so when the First Amendment Coalition filed requests to see the clemency requests, the former and current governor pretended each time, in the words of one pro bono lawyer on the case, that “rather than abide by the Court’s rulings against complete secrecy, the Governor/Attorney General repeated the same arguments, every time, as if the Supreme Court had never addressed the issue.”

Not anymore. Last week, the California Supreme Court, en banc, announced a rule change – rejecting the Governor’s automatic confidentiality stance – stating that the contents of records filed by the Governor will be evaluated for their confidentiality on a case-by-case basis:

“Regardless of whether the Governor properly may refuse requests for access to clemency files when they are in his possession, an issue upon which we express no views, we conclude that the documents that are forwarded to the court pursuant to Penal Code section 4851 and supply the basis for a recommendation decision should be available for public inspection. Accordingly, henceforth upon the receipt of a motion to unseal a clemency record before the court pursuant to article V, section 8 and Penal Code section 4851, the Clerk and Executive Officer shall return the record for resubmission in conformity with this order and the Rules of Court pertaining to filings under seal. (Cal. Rules of Court, rules 2.550(d), 8.45, 8.46.)” (Emphasis added).

So what this means is that while citizens — and even potential twice-convicted applicants for clemency — still have to file a motion to unseal the records, and transparency is not guaranteed, the California Supreme Court has pretty much laid down the marker that clemency requests from the Governor, by dint of being transmitted to the Supreme Court, are presumed to be public records. Given the monkey business that has surrounded presidential pardons and commutations for decades (Trump commuted the sentence of corrruptocrat Rod Blagojevich (D-IL.) and Clinton pardoned financial crook Marc Rich (Major Clinton donor) it’s good to know that California will allow reporters, citizens, and yes, even twice-convicted felons to see how that sausage was made.

When the Founding Fathers instilled the concept of separation of powers, they knew what they were doing.
**Update: fixes reference to Blogojevich commutation. Thanks, IP readers!

FOR THIS I GET PUT IN FACEBOOK JAIL? Pornstar Mia Khalifa (NSFW link here) posts an inane pro-Palestinian tweet to which I respond that generally speaking, women who (for a living) show their genitals, perform random sex acts with strangers on film, not to mention run around without a headscarf are generally murdered in Islamic countries. That’s not even close to being in dispute. Here’s the post that “violated community standards”:

UPDATE: They admit they got it wrong:

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related:

A TIMELY REPRISE: I wrote this article for The Daily Caller a few years ago. It seems sadly appropriate. And the outrage about the IDF bombing the building where the AP resides doesn’t cut it. The Committee to Project Journalists’ indignant press release never once mentions that the building was home to Hamas operations.

The AP, caught up behind the facts, later issued this statement:

I have to say I find this a bit hard to believe. As one commenter noted on my FB page:

“If AP did not know that Hamas was in the building, then they are incompetent reporters. If AP knew that Hamas was in the building but kept silent, then they are complicit. If AP comprehended that it would be used as a human shield, then it is a Hamas collaborator.”

I might add as a denouement that using US journalists as hostages and shields is nothing new to Islamic militants.

THE ONLY COLOR THAT REALLY MATTERS IS GREEN: Social scientists (at Yale, of all places) have produced a preliminary study showing that Americans are less responsive to race-based appeals than they are to class-based appeals. JustTheNews reports that:

“Appeals to class interests are best at increasing support for progressive policies across racial and political groups “despite leftward shifts in public attitudes towards issues of racial equality,” according to Josh Kalla, assistant professor of political science and data science, and doctoral student Micah English.”

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes reading Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and yes, even Marx understand that our human instincts — and political choices — are more geared towards satisfaction of personal basic needs rather than “political identification.” For most, the latter is merely a means to acquire the former. In shorthand, regardless of race, most people inherently want security and sustenance, and political choices are merely means to obtain those things. But apparently the approach of most policy-makers is to override the peoples’ preferences with their own, allegedly superior, understanding:

“It questions the wisdom of “Democratic elites,” including President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, racializing ostensibly race-neutral issues such as infrastructure, climate change and minimum wage increases.”

There is a certain amount of bravery in these scholars publishing this work, given Yale’s (and the rest of the so-called “progressives”) propensity for cancel culture. It if does not fit their world-view or narrative, it is doomed be pounced upon by keyboard warriors:

“The duo could become a target of race-focused progressive activists, given the repercussions faced by data scientist David Shor for tweeting research that found peaceful protest was historically more successful than violent protest […] Shared during the riots stemming from George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the tweet drew widespread criticism in progressive circles, and Shor’s employer fired him soon after.”

I’m still waiting for self-righteous and “woke” Yale students and alumni to demand that the school be renamed “Harriet Tubman University” instead of honoring a slave trader, but I’m not holding my breath.

The value of having a Yale degree is money in the bank, and as if to prove the researchers’ point, these elite will act — like everyone else — in their own self-interest.

MORE STATES SHOULD DO THIS: Joshua Silverstein, Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is an old pal from my law school class of NYU ’96, and might be the best example of a truly “classical” liberal, at the heart of which shares many values with genuine conservatism and thoughtful libertarianism. At the heart of his opinion piece in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is simply that government is not a supreme power answerable to no-one. The foundation for ending sovereign immunity begins with this simple proposition:

“Sovereign immunity is a holdover from the era when most countries were monarchies. The legal basis for sovereign immunity was as follows: Because the monarch created the courts, the monarch is superior to the courts. And thus the monarch is not subject to the jurisdiction of the courts.”

This makes complete sense to me as a person who believes in smaller and less intrusive government. Silverstein continues:

“There is a fundamental principle of American law that provides that no person should be a judge in his or her own case. But that is exactly what happens when a person sues the state of Arkansas for money under current law: The Legislature itself ultimately decides if the injured person is entitled to monetary relief from the state.

That is inconsistent with the notion of due process that underlies our justice system. Sovereign immunity thus makes it far harder for citizens to enforce their fundamental legal rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.”

This is pretty hard to argue against.