Documents Confirm Fox News Hypocrisy

We’ve now learned that, on January 6, Fox news hosts were texting Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief-of-staff, urging him to beg Trump to take the riot seriously, hours before telling the public Antifa caused the violence.

During the MAGA invasion of the Capitol, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade pleaded with Meadows. “Mark, the President needs to tell those people to go home. This is hurting all of us. He’s destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote. Then on TV she called the rioters “people . . . antithetical to MAGA,” and suggested that Antifa was involved.

That’s 98 on a hypocrisy scale of 100. Kilmeade wrote, “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you’ve accomplished.” Hannity wrote, “Can he make a statement? Tell people to leave the Capitol?” They all knew these were Trump’s people.

It’s sad that we’re not surprised. Fox personalities purported to be journalists, but were informal Trump advisors who used their platforms to mislead us. Had Fox existed in 1974, President Nixon might have finished his second term.

Meadows agreed Trump should stand up and dissuade his supporters – inspired by his lies about a stolen election – from further violence. Meadows responded he’d been trying. (So had Donald Trump, Jr. He knew who was responsible, and that Trump’s involvement was obvious.)

Now Meadows claims Trump was moving as fast as possible to minimize the violence. He hopes we’ve forgotten that even when Trump finally spoke, supposedly telling folks to go home, he emphasized that he loved them and that they should be angry about election fraud.

Meadows supposes we’ve forgotten Republican Senator Ben Sasse’s disgust that Trump, according to senior White House officials, was “delighted” by his supporters’ break-in, and confused by others on his team not sharing his excitement.

Jonah Goldberg, a recent Fox News refugee, shines some interesting light on the hypocrisy: “I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (‘Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?’”)

Goldberg says he’s “a conservative who passionately believes the conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist, personality cult nonsense that defines so much of  prime time Trumpism is not conservatism rightly understood, or even conservative in any meaningful sense.” Conservatives believe in free-enterprise, national security, and limiting governmental social programs. Trump believes only in Trump. (For example: Trump was clearly pro-choice, until he was seeking the Republican nomination.)

Conservatives preach the Constitution. Trump tried an end-run around it. Trump’s vague “stolen election” claims were so silly they failed in every court, even with judges he’d appointed. Trump tried to steal the election right in front of us, and nearly succeeded.

Trump’s robbery attempt included the January 6 effort to stop the vote count and have Vice-President Mike Pence let Republican Legislatures decide the election – but also includes the rash of state voter-suppression laws aimed at a more successful effort to veto the voters in 2024.

Clearly January 6 ain’t over. And good people who listen to Fox “personalities” should know those “personalities” don’t believe their own words.

For example, most conservative pundits are vaccinated – but not recommending listeners get shots.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 19 December 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[This stuff seems pretty basic. What amazes me is that folks are in such denial. I get why some top Republican politicians deny reality and kowtow to Mr. Trump: they want his support, they want his hard-core supporters’ support, and the changes putting swing states’ election processes in politicians’ hands could be the winning edge for some Republican who loses a close presidential election in 2024. More power is always worth foregoing a little truth or cutting away a bit of our constitution.

But why do others buy into the stuff Fox News personalities say, that even those personalities don’t believe? Are we that deeply immersed in a red vs. blue partisanship analogous to rooting for Ohio State or Michigan, Oklahoma or Texas, the Yankees versus the Red Sox? My team, right or wrong.

What’s most troubling is, the deeper we get into this division, as it gets more and more obvious to some of us that Mr. Trump is what he seemed at first, others get more and more certain that Mr. Trump is wonderful, unspecified folks in Italy were changing the voting machines through the Internet, and . . . whatever. We’re seeing increasing evidentiary support for one side; but the other has Fox News shills.]

[It was a bad week for Fox, although that likely won’t matter to its fans. Not only did its actual journalist leave for CNN, a judge let Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit go forward against Fox. Dominion sued for defamation. Fox aired a bunch of shows supporting the voter fraud idea, and even pillorying one guy at Dominion so badly that, like a lot of election officials in swing states, he had to start worrying about his and his family’s security. Fox moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it merely had discussions in which some panelists like Rudy Giuliani expressed such opinions. The judge not only denied the motion, which is pretty standard at this early stage, but went further to rebut Fox’s key argument that it had been airing differing views on a controversy, as journalists should do, fairly and impartially. Conventional wisdom suggests that Fox will now settle, paying Dominion a bunch of money, not only because it may well lose the lawsuit but because the intrusive discovery process, a bit part of all large lawsuits, would likely result in many more of the kinds of embarrassing evidence discussed in the column, though those came from the January 6 investigation by a congressional committee.

But I’d love a trial in the Dominion lawsuit. An increasingly important aspect of huge trials (and a specialty of mine before I left that world) is the use of visual support, including deposition videotape snippets. I’ve watched jurors’ faces watching trial openings spiced up by side-by-side pairings of a deposition witness saying he never advocated X with his “secret’ email instructing an associate to do X, or cross-examinations in which the witness who just told the jurors he never thought of Y is asked to explain his advocacy of Y in an email, with the email above him on-screen. With Fox, there’ll be lots of secret and damning emails to play with, and an abundance of footage of them saying passionately what their documents show they didn’t believe.] 

 

Mandatory Gun Insurance Is Common Sense

I applaud the Oakland County (Michigan) prosecutor’s decision to indict for involuntary manslaughter the parents of the boy who killed four fellow students last week.

If ever a case demanded such a charge, this is it. The parents bragged on social media that the dangerous weapon was the boy’s birthday present; when a worried teacher caught the boy ordering ammunition online, the boy’s mother texted him, “LOL. I’m not mad at you. You just have to learn not to get caught.” Next day, after the boy’s conduct worried school authorities, the parents “flatly refused” to take him out of school for the rest of the day. Then, . . . bang!

In New Mexico, “involuntary manslaughter” means the defendant should have known his/her conduct was dangerous, but “acted with a willful disregard for the safety of others,” causing someone’s death. That would cover the Michigan case. Still, our Legislature should review our law and consider changes clarifying the laws’ applicability to gun cases, without violating gun owners’ constitutional rights.

I suggest mandatory gun insurance, similar to mandatory automobile insurance; a safe-storage law; and including a notice with firearm licenses or permits that “the licensee acknowledges that s/he understands that firearms are dangerous and that permitting felons, children, and persons who are emotionally or mentally unstable to possess firearms endangers them and unknown third parties.” It may sound silly to have gun owners acknowledge that guns are dangerous, particularly in kids’ hands; but no shyster could get someone like the Crumbleys off by arguing that they didn’t figure the safety of others was implicated when they let their troubled teenager have easy access to a machine gun.

One benefit of mandatory gun insurance is that possessing an uninsured firearm would constitute an unlawful act. That would facilitate prosecution where someone acted with willful disregard for others’ safety.

Although the wrongly-decided 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Heller v D.C. vastly expanded individual gun rights, it conceded limitations. The Second Amendment couches the right as helpful to “a well-regulated militia.” Insurance and licensure constitute appropriate regulation, even if stronger gun laws that sharply restrict who can get those licenses would not be upheld. (A few states have considered mandatory insurance, and I think San Jose, CA passed such an ordinance this year, but I couldn’t find a Supreme Court decision one way or the other.) Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D-NY) introduced in 2018 the Firearm Risk Protection Act, requiring proof of liability insurance before gun purchase, but it didn’t pass. Supporters noted that car fatalities had declined by 25 percent in a decade, but gun fatalities kept rising.

Insurance would rely on the market. Insurers specialize in weighing risks and calculating odds and charge appropriately. As car insurance premiums are based on car and driver, so that a 19-year-old man with a Porsche and two DWI’s pays more than the proverbial little old lady, a hunter who’s never had an incident with his shotgun would pay less than the first-timer buying a semi-automatic. People would be financially discouraged from buying the most dangerous guns, and encouraged to attend gun-safety classes and adopt safe practices.

Safe storage rules could save lives, by educating and encouraging well-intentioned gun owners to do right. More gun-owners would know the rules, and follow them; and ignoring them would help clarify responsibility for a shooting.

We need to do more. These steps are common sense.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 12 December 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site. Interestingly, fellow columnist Algernon D’Ammassa touched on gun-violence today too, in "Santa, Please Bring the Ammo!"]

[First, I’m not happy to see anyone in distress, or in a cage; and, yeah, listening to Mrs. Crumbley’s tearful repetitions of “Not Guilty” from jail made me sympathize, and recall my own blissfully dumb moves. I suspect most of us can recall many of those, if we’re honest, and were lucky more of them didn’t have the tragic consequences they could have had. She didn’t intend to kill four schoolkids. But her carelessness, when she had plenty of warning, did kill four schoolkids. And aside from whether she deserves to be punished (as the law says she does), I’m convinced that other parents or siblings who own guns and have offspring or siblings who aren’t too responsible watched her pathetic performance, on Internet or TV, and some of them might see themselves there, and improve their gun-safety protocols at home.]

[Second, I can’t predict with certainty how the U.S. Supreme Court would rule on mandatory gun insurance and/or on reasonable gun-storage safety rules that weren’t too onerous on someone who might need that gun for self-defense. The Heller ruling was a complete departure from nearly 200 years of cases that tied the Second Amendment right somewhat to the stated reason for it, “a well-regulated militia,” and denied that it gave individuals the unbridled right to point a cannon at city hall, but Heller changed all that. (Was the fact that a key justice’s wife essentially worked for the NRA coincidental?) The current supreme court could be the worst we’ve seen in 100 or 120 years, and might do anything; but why shouldn’t we try. And if I’m right that no Supreme Court decision has rejected the idea, why shouldn’t NEW MEXICO enact a sensible law requiring mandatory insurance?]

[Anyway, thanks for reading this; and take care out there!]

[btw, experienced local defense attorney Deborah Thuman, correctly pointed out that sheister, which we write as shyster, is the appropriate spelling, and that the German refers to a man taking a shit, and not necessarily to attorney.

She also provided a link to the transaction record required by federal law [ https://www.atf.gov/firearms/atf-form-4473-firearms-transaction-record-revisions ], which already provides that folks with mental illnesses can't buy guns, and observed, "In my 27 years aas a criminal defense attorney, I can't think of a single instance where my client bought a gun from anyone required to keep records.  As long as there is a secondary market for guns, there is no gun control."  She recommends outlawing assault rifles.  I think we should do that, if the political climate allows, but also impose mandatory gun insurance.  While habitual criminals get a gun through the secondary market, I'm not sure that's as consistently true of families buying an assault rifle for the fun of it but not treating it as, gee whiz!, something that could kill another human being.

She added, as to holding parents accountable, that in Children's Court the judges are extremely reluctant to lock up a parent instead of the kid, even where it appears that the parent was really more at fault than the kid.]

Citizen-Called Grand Juries?

Reading that the New Mexico Supreme Court paused citizens’ grand juries to investigate the Governor’s mostly fine handling of the pandemic sparked a memory from 1977.

The news story correctly noted that we’re one of the few states where citizens can petition for a grand jury and have one called. It added, “[NM Sen. David] Gallegos, who is also a Eunice school board member, said he believes this is the first time the constitutional provision for citizen-led grand juries has been used.” Actually, it’s often been used.

It is an unusual provision. I learned of it in 1977, after I’d quit my job as El Paso Times bureau chief in Las Cruces. A gentleman who alleged that police officers had beaten him got 75 people to sign his petition for a grand jury, to which he would bring his claim. Third Judicial District Court duly convened a grand jury. (Today it would require “the greater of two hundred registered voters or two percent of the registered voters.”)

I’d been the investigative reporter here, and, after three years, people knew me. (Initially, city officials were shocked to see a long-haired guy stroll into city commission meetings and plunk his motorcycle helmet down on the reporters’ table. Mayor Tommy Graham dubbed me, “Captain Zoom.”)

So when the list of grand jurors included “Peter Goodman,” folks were frankly disbelieving. A rare citizen-called grand jury, and a local muckraker is on it? (So far as I know, it was pure chance. Not some court functionary being mischievous.)

The thing about a grand jury is, once formed, it may investigate any public malfeasance in the county, and must inspect the jail, which we did. (My main memory of that jail, possibly from another visit, was a city police detective taunting a prisoner. The prisoner may have deserved it; but a few years earlier that same detective had brought a movie camera to antiwar demonstrations, to record and identify us.)

As I recall, we didn’t indict anyone for the alleged beating that had caused the jury. (I have to be vague here, because grand jury matters are secret, even decades later.) District Attorney Ernie Williams brought us a few criminal cases. We also investigated some things I’d been told by employees about a public entity, much to that entity’s chagrin, but ultimately we did not make any findings or indictments regarding those claims.

One thing I noticed, and have confirmed since during decades of intermittent contact with juries, was that although we came from all walks of life, everyone took the work seriously and did the best possible job.

So, yeah, it’s an obscure constitutional provision most states don’t have; but it’s definitely been used; and I’m kind of fond of it, mostly because, as folks in the Progressive Era passionately believed, a citizen’s grand jury with such power can check abuses of power.

However, the current effort to beat up the Governor with a grand jury smells rotten. Agree or disagree with her, there’s no hint of criminal activity; and where’s the malfeasance? (I’m also not sure whom a county’s grand jury has jurisdiction over.) Besides, if Lujan Grisham has to testify at a dozen grand juries, she won’t have time to do her job. Could the juries then investigate the neglect of duty they caused?

I hope this partisan abuse of the grand jury process won't spark a constitutional amendment rescinding that right.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 5 December 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.] 

 

 

Peng Shuai and the Rest of Us

Even folks who don’t follow tennis now know who Peng Shuai is, and may be contemplating what her situation means for international relations and democracy.

Peng is a veteran professional tennis player from the Peoples Republic of China, who was briefly ranked No. 1 in doubles in 2014.

November 2, Peng alleged that a former PRC senior vice premier sexually assaulted her three years ago. Within twenty minutes that tweet (on Wenbo) disappeared. So did Peng. Worried friends and tennis officials reached out to her. Nothing. State-controlled media aired unconvincing videos of Peng and said she wanted to spend time with her family and hoped people would respect her privacy.

An International Olympic Committee official says he talked to Peng by video, with a Chinese olympic official. He says she’s fine. Of course, the IOC’s overriding priority is to hold the Winter Olympics in February as smoothly and grandly as possible. In Beijing. Unsurprisingly, the IOC statement omitted Peng’s allegations, which Chinese media euphemize as “the things people talk about.”

A former U.S. president and a former New York governor wish they could so easily disappear harassed women and silence those pesky reporters.

Peng is being “reeducated.” Uighurs and Tibetans get reeducated by the thousands. (Traveling around China long ago, we passed through a remote area experiencing plague. When we reached Lhasa, a young British man sent a story on the plague to the newspaper he worked for. The government came for him. For days, they kept him all day in the police station, until he confessed his error. He had embarrassed China. They couldn’t do to him whatever they’re doing to Peng; and they can’t do to Peng, probably, what they are doing to tens of thousands.

You can’t dissent. You are better off if you are Han, not some lesser ethnicity. Whether from racism or some misguided view of communism, the PRC is destroying the ethnic culture and religions of Tibetans, Uighurs, and others – reeducating them in camps.

We should contemplate Peng’s fate. Out country should reconsider helping the PRC use the Olympics to glorify China. We should ask whether “business as usual” is appropriate. (These are tough issues. If we’d boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics, we’d never have seen video of Jesse Owens leaving Aryans in his dust.)

Contemplating Peng reminds us of how different China is from us – and how we’re similar. We too are still battling to outgrow racism and sexism. We laugh at how ludicrous the Chinese government’s lies sound; but you can get away with a lot, if you’ve silenced independent journalism. Here, it’s different; but we just had a president who rarely deigned to make his lies plausible, and who largely got away with absurd falsehoods. On January 6, and since, in state capitols around our nation, our democracy has been under attack.

If you’re a Republican, maybe you sympathize. Some Republicans believe, as firmly as some Chinese officials believe in their Party, that they’re doing the right thing for our country by limiting citizens’ participation in democracy. They’re “patriots.”

But democracy is critical. Ours is endangered. Yes, the electoral college, corruption, gerrymandering, and voter suppression have substantially limited democracy; but what we have matters. Without it, we are China. Or Brazil. We can’t let even “our side” toss it aside for shortterm partisan gain.

We have much to give thanks for; but if we sleep we could quickly lose much.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 28 November 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[By the way, Happy Thanksgiving! There’s a lot wrong with some of our most common ideas about this holiday, but gratitude is worth celebrating, and practicing. I know it’s getting trendy these days to point this out, but gratitude is not only a graceful attitude, it’s incredibly healthy, and both personal observation and scientific reports tell me it makes us happier.]

[Peng Shuai may not feel so grateful these days. I wish her freedom. As I suggest in the column, her well-publicized plight is important, but partly because it symbolizes the repression many our suffering. Read first-hand accounts of Uighurs and Tibetans.)

This is not the place for me to say much about my personal insight into all this, from various sources including travels in China and Tibet (and among the Uighurs) many years ago. (My travels, in 1985-88, were much closer in time to the Chinese invasion of Tibet and to the Cultural Revolution than to 2021.)  I loved China.  From what I saw first hand, and the direct contradictions between what good people who hated the Chinese Government and good people who praised the Chinese Government, I wanted to learn more, and did; and I portrayed some of it in a novel.

Soon I’ll post on my blog more about that experience, and what I learned.  This morning, every time I start to summarize it I find myself rapidly and passionately writing more than I have time to write or you have time to read this morning.

I will say that I saw, and heard harrowing first-hand tales from folks who’d experienced it, the terrible pain and devastation the Cultural Revolution had caused; and I came to a better understanding of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

(On one occasion, we traveling through a remote western area experiencing plague. When we reached Lhasa, a young British man sent a story on the plague to the newspaper he worked for. The government came for him. For days, they kept him all day in the police station, until he confessed his error. He had embarrassed China, but he was a wai guo ren.  A British citizen. They couldn’t do to him whatever they’re doing to Peng; and they can’t do to Peng, probably, what they are doing to tens of thousands.)

1985 - Peasant

However, I say all this without forgetting the scale of the problem Mao and his cohorts faced when they suddenly won their underdog fight against a warlord (Chiang Kai-shek) well supported by the U.S. Even in their treatment of the Tibetans, which I abhor, there was more good intention mixed in with the self-interested repression than most realize.]

[Sorry if I too often mention the hope of preserving our democracy. It is under attack. The attack is bold, brazen, and dangerous. I worry about its effects. And as long as folks pursue voter suppression and anti-democratic policies, while claiming loudly to be “patriots,” I guess I’ll keep mentioning that they are being misled.]

1985 The Potala

1985 "Whose Dreams?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Notes:

Peasant: in beautiful countryside, I guessed he was carrying so proudly a photos of his father and mother, or his grandparents; but this was recently "rehabilitated" former President Li Shao-qi, I think, and the portrait we can't see may have been Ching Ling.  His pride in the portrait is clear.  His clothing was identical to 80% of the other citizens of China, except that the shirt also came in khaki; it was cheap clothing; but to the extent the government could ensure it, everyone was clothed, and housed, and fed.  Unlike more democratic countries where one might see dozens of beggars and then a fat, rich family driving by in a fancy car.  Despite horrible mistakes, the Chinese Government was trying.

The Potala: It's a beautiful building in a beautiful land.  It was both the seat of government and the palace the Dalai Lamas lived in, until the current Dalai Lhama, now a wonderful old man, fled from the Chinese as a 14-year-old boy, in March 1959.  In his bedroom I noticed a drinking cup that was a skull, a reminder of death's imminence.  ironically, this view was from near the toilet in the local hotel we stayed in.

"Whose Dreams" expresses more than I can put into words.  The bicyclist is Tibetan.  The Potala, though still  visited by devout pilgrims, is now sort of a tourist attraction for Chinese and foreigners.  Across the street from the sacred Potala are photo backdrops such as this one, which expresses a sort of Chinese paradise: sufficient wealth to own a TV, and a great view of the beautiful countryside near Guilin (not far from where I met that peasant) which is famous in China.  Tibetans were both resentful of the Chinese and, sometimes, envious of them.  They were angry, but impotent.  Whether this gentleman was envying the view of Guilin, disgusted by Chinese commercialization of the Dalai Lhama's home, or just taking a break was more than I could ask, since both of us spoke lousy Mandarin.