The aftermath of the Fox-Dominion settlement

As far as a I can tell of the settlement of the case, Fox News personalities who told all those lies about Dominion and the elections will not have to make on-air apologies.

It looks like Dominion wanted a large financial settlement more than they wanted on-air apologies from Fox, and Fox wanted to avoid giving on-air apologies and was willing to pay almost $800 million to avoid doing that. Dominion likely used the demand for apologies as leverage to get Fox to pay up. While this is a large amount, Murdoch media is used to seeing fines for wrongdoing as just the cost of doing business. While many of us would have liked to see all the Fox people squirm on the witness stand and show public contrition for their irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric, ultimately Dominion is a business, not a pro-democracy or media watchdog organization, and it made a business decision.

But there are other cases that in the works and it will be interesting to see what impact this result will have on those cases.
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Last minute delay in Fox-Dominion defamation trial

[UPDATE: The two parties have reached a settlement in which Fox will pay Dominion $785.5 million.

This settlement is not the end of the legal woes for Fox.

Fox still faces several legal battles related to its decision to broadcast false claims. Smartmatic, another voting equipment company, is suing the company for $2.7bn. Abby Grossberg, a former Fox employee who worked for Bartiromo and Carlson, is also suing the company, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony.

The network also faces a separate lawsuit from a shareholder who is seeking damages and argues that executives breached their fiduciary duty to the company by causing false claims about the election to be broadcast.

Fox has also admitted that it told lies about the election. It is not yet clear what public apologies Fox will give on the air, if any. The details of the settlement once released may clarify that point.]

The defamation trial of Dominion against Fox News was supposed to get underway yesterday but on Sunday the judge in the case postponed it until today. No reasons were given for the delay, leading to speculation that lawyers for both sides were trying to negotiate a deal. It is not unusual for deals to be struck on the eve of a trial as both sides play a game of chicken to see whether the other will make the first move, signaling weakness. Although the judge on Monday said that the trial would start today, it may be that a deal has been reached by the time people read this post.

It seems likely that if the idea of a deal was broached, it was by Fox since the amount of pre-trial information released has been pretty damning to them. But what might have pushed them over the edge is the fact that the judge ruled that Rupert Murdoch could be forced by Dominion to testify. This came in the wake of Fox admitting that it had misled the judge by downplaying Murdoch’s role in the company , by claiming that he was not an officer but had mostly an honorary role, which seemed to tick off the judge.
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Attack ad against DeSantis

It looks like the gloves are off as this ad by a seemingly pro-Trump group demonstrates. However, in these days of front groups and hoaxes, it is hard to know who is behind any internet ads. It may be by a group that is trying to stir up a fight between the two.

The ad uses as its framework the story that DeSantis had been seen using his fingers to eat pudding but the message is something that Democrats might have put out since it uses his support for cutting social security, Medicare, and raising the retirement age against him.

The Tennessee state legislature goes off the rails

The old saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was provided another example in the Tennessee state legislature where Republicans have a supermajority that enables them to do pretty much anything they want. Recently they used that power to vote to expel two young black members of the legislature because of their calls for gun reforms following yet another mass shooting in the US, this one resulting in the deaths of three students and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville. This expulsion has made national news and the two expelled members have become national figures.

Sue Halpern gave the background to this action.

On March 30th, three Democratic members—Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson—now known as the Tennessee Three, stepped into the well of the chamber without being formally recognized and led the student protesters sitting in the gallery in the chant “No action, no peace,” demanding that lawmakers pass gun-reform legislation. Jones and Pearson used a megaphone. On April 6th, their Republican colleagues voted to expel both members for having violated the decorum of the chamber. When Johnson was asked why they, and not she, had been kicked out, she was blunt, saying, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.”

This article reports on the backlash to the expulsions, including the fact that the constituencies represented by the expelled members acted quickly to send them back into the legislature as interim members until elections are held in their districts.
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The latest classified information leak

As soon as I read that the person alleged to have leaked classified information on the internet was a young, white, gun-loving religious person who had exchanged racist memes with his friends on a chat group, I felt that the Republican nutters would see him as one of their own and immediately come to his defense. These are, after all, the same people who treated Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of hero after he traveled to another state with an AR-15 weapon and killed two demonstrators protesting police violence. And sure enough, that is what has happened.

People have expressed surprise that a mere 21-year old member of the National Guard could have access to this kind of information.

The FBI has arrested a 21-year-old air national guardsman in Massachusetts suspected of being responsible for the leak of US classified defence documents that laid bare military secrets and upset Washington’s relations with key allies.
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Airman first class Teixeira was in the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard under the duty title of “cyber transport systems journeyman”, responsible for keeping the internet working at airbases. He joined the guard in 2019.

Teixeira is believed to have been the leader of an online chat group where hundreds of photographs of secret and top-secret documents were first uploaded, from late last year to March. The online group called itself Thug Shaker Central, made up of 20 to 30 young men and teenagers brought together by an enthusiasm for guns, military gear and video games. Racist language was a common feature of the group.

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Evangelicals put the Republican party in a bind

I wrote recently about how Republicans have dug a hole for themselves because their voting base, especially evangelical Christians, has taken the abortion issue to far greater extremes than the party establishment would like, in the process alienating many people who, while they may be uneasy about abortion, are even more disturbed about making it so hard to get that it becomes almost impossible for women to get one even in cases of rape or incest or the health of the woman.

Then there is the other problem that evangelical Christians present to Republicans in that while Republican candidates seek their support, evangelicals are not the majority of the voting population and getting their vote is not sufficient to put them over the top.

We see this dynamic play out in the first state to vote in the Republican nomination contest, which is Iowa. This has the format of caucuses where people gather together on one evening in winter to discuss and vote for candidates at public meetings. Such formats are favorable to those who are very committed and in the case of the Iowa caucuses, that consists of people like evangelicals. Already we are seeing a steady stream of Republican hopefuls going, or planning to go, to Iowa to pander to that group. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott have already made their pilgrimage.
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Republicans are failing at debt ceiling hostage taking

The deadline is looming for the debt ceiling to be raised to avoid the US government going into some sort of default, never a good thing. The early deadlines have already passed with some accounting devices being used to avoid default so far but June 4th is said to be the final deadline for getting the ceiling raised.

Republicans in the House of Representatives, ostensibly led by speaker Kevin McCarthy but actually by the nutter caucus of the party, have demanded that Joe Biden agree to negotiations on spending cuts before they will raise the ceiling. But Biden has said that while he is willing to negotiate on the budget, he will not do so as part of the debt ceiling. Biden has released his own budget and asked the Republicans to do the same before any negotiations can begin but so far they have not been able to come up with a budget that will satisfy the disparate elements of their caucus, especially the nutters who are now so dominant.

The problem for Republicans is that many of the programs they want to cut are those that the public wants to preserve.
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The waning of Trump’s influence

James Risen writes that there are many signs that Trump’s influences is waning. One of those is the fact that the US military is proceeding with the renaming of military bases that had been named after leaders of the Confederacy. Trump had vigorously opposed such changes, pandering to the racists in his party who view the Confederacy sympathetically. But now there are hardly any protests at the changes.

THE U.S. ARMY began to strip its bases of their old Confederate names last week, as Donald Trump faced a possible criminal indictment. The timing was hardly a coincidence.

Neither reckoning would have been possible if Trump were still president. Both have been winding their way through the government bureaucracy for the past two years since Trump left office and are now happening at the same time as part of a growing repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.
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After Trump was defeated in 2020, he vetoed legislation creating a commission to rename the bases, but Congress was finally able to override it. If Trump had been reelected, he almost certainly would have continued trying to obstruct the renaming efforts.
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THE RENAMING OF Fort Pickett last week prompted no protests and hardly a murmur of criticism, apart from a few nasty comments on the Facebook page of the Virginia National Guard, which uses the base. Indeed, the lack of outrage seems to be one more small sign that Trump’s power, and his ability to generate anger outside of his devoted base, are waning.

Trump’s mounting legal problems pose a more direct threat to his power and are a more personal form of reckoning. Although some Republican pundits and political figures have claimed that Trump will regain political strength by being indicted, the ex-president’s own fury at the prospect, which was on full display in Waco, reveals the truth: Trump is deeply afraid of ending up in prison.

He has spent his life exploiting legal loopholes and has often succeeded by outlasting his opponents. But his victories have mostly come in civil lawsuits when he was in business or while he was president and controlled the Justice Department. He has never faced the kind of legal peril that he does now.

The threat seems to be driving him even further around the bend than ever before. He now openly engages in full-throated conspiracy theories while inciting violence against his opponents; he held his rally in Waco knowing that it was scheduled in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound there, which ended with a deadly government raid and fire that has taken on deep symbolism among violent, far-right extremists.

It is hard to be confident about predictions of Trump’s demise since he consumes so much media space. But he gets that attention by resorting to more and more extreme claims and rhetoric. Someone who is more assured of his position would not feel the need to be so inflammatory.