And if the folks at Wikipedia are wondering why their contributions are down—I'm still getting heartrending messages when I go over there—they should read Matt Taibbi: How America's Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up. Specifically: Wikipedia scrubbed the "Real Clear Politics National Average" numbers from its poll-reporting page. Gee, wonder why?
Well, you can guess before clicking over. But here's an excerpt containing a clue:
Six months ago, when former Wikipedia chief Katherine Maher became CEO of NPR, video emerged of her talking about strategies at Wikipedia. She said the company eventually abandoned its “free and open” mantra when she realized “this radical openness… did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” Free and open “recapitulated” too many of the same “power structures,” resulting in too much emphasis on the “Western canon,” the “written tradition,” and “this white male, Westernized construct around who matters.”
Taibbi's article is mostly paywalled, but what you can see is bad enough.
What's Ms Maher worried about these days? Well, as of a couple days ago: NPR CEO warns of ‘hostile environment’ ahead for journalism,
Speaking Friday during a meeting of NPR’s board, CEO Katherine Maher said Republicans’ “dramatic sweep” of the election means “we are likely to face scrutiny, investigation and renewed pushes to eliminate federal funding for public media.”
Pun Salad says: "Here's hoping!"
Also of note:
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That's incredible! Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist musters up some Gaetz defense: House Gaetz Probe Relies On Witnesses DOJ Found Not Credible.
Many Americans are sick and tired of elected officials and media pundits doing nothing as DOJ attempted to destroy the country with its abuse of the rule of law. Among the many powerful figures in Washington, D.C. opposed to the Gaetz nomination are some who are attempting to thwart it by releasing a report from the House Ethics Committee that will attempt to tie Gaetz to salacious allegations involving child sex trafficking.
The report comes years after DOJ dropped its investigation into the same claims on the grounds that the two central witnesses had serious credibility issues. Yet these are the same two central witnesses the House Ethics Committee has relied on for its critical report of Gaetz—the same report it is leaking to compliant reporters as part of a coordinated effort to thwart his nomination as President-elect Donald Trump’s next attorney general.
Why is it this reminds me of a quote from Addams Family Values?:
Debbie Jellinsky: Isn't he a lady-killer!
Gomez: Acquitted! -
So I lean more toward that whole checks-and-balances feature, and as Yuval Levin says: Senate Republicans Have a Job to Do. After disrespecting Tulsi, RFK Jr, and Hegseth, he moves on to…
A similar logic applies to Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Here, too, the familiar measures of qualification would already point to trouble. Gaetz has very little experience as a lawyer, none in law enforcement, and has never run anything. But he has been a legislator for 14 years, which is certainly meaningful experience. In traditional terms, he might be borderline approvable. But again, as with Kennedy, the fundamental problem is a matter of character, and in ways that directly bear on the job Gaetz is seeking.
Even putting aside various serious accusations about his private behavior, his public actions as a member of Congress show that he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and refuses to be bounded by any sorts of rules or norms. Gaetz has shown an exceptional ability to operate within an institution without in any way being constrained or shaped by its purpose or by his role in it. That is exactly the opposite of what you would want in the leader of the federal agency most responsible for the facilitating and administering of the rule of law. It’s precisely how DOJ has gone wrong when it has gone wrong in recent years, and the idea that Gaetz could fix that is thoroughly belied by simply everything about him.
This resistance to institutional roles, along with his bottomless fealty to Trump, is again precisely why he must have seemed to the president like a good fit. But the Senate should want to avoid an AG who would simply be the president’s “obsequious instrument,” and more generally should be looking for a good fit for the job, not for the president. No senator could seriously believe that Gaetz is such a fit. And it is simply and plainly their job to say so.
As I seem to be saying a lot lately: we'll see how that works out.
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Waiting for the call. Christopher Freiman says J'Accuse!: You're Probably Willing to Price Gouge (and That's OK!)
Imagine that Walt is gently swaying in a hammock on a well-deserved vacation day when his phone rings. It’s his boss. She tells him that his co-worker has an emergency and can’t come into work. Although it’s last minute, she asks if Walt would be willing to work today—otherwise, the store will be too short staffed to open.
Walt says, “Look, I’m enjoying my time off even more than I thought I would. And, as you know, I’ve been looking forward to this vacation day for a month and I’d really rather not come in. But I’ll tell you what—if you give me double pay for the day, I’ll put down the lemonade and get to work.” His employer agrees given that the benefit of opening the store exceeds the cost of Walt’s extra pay.
I suspect that most of you can relate to Walt and, indeed, find yourself sympathetic to his situation—it doesn’t seem like it’s wrong for him to insist upon something extra for breaking up his vacation to clock in at work.
Notice, though, that Walt is guilty of “price gouging.” A wage is just the price of labor, after all. And here Walt is taking advantage of the shortage of labor and raising his “price.” But it also seems like he is making a reasonable ask.
If she was going to sell her modest home in Cambridge, I'm pretty sure even Liz Warren would not shy away from charging whatever the market would bear.
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Being human, it would be expected. So I'm sure you won't be surprised by Joe Lancaster's headline: Starlink 2024 Election Fraud Claims Show Democrats Aren’t Immune to Conspiracy Theories.
After the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump and his allies floated numerous hypotheses to explain his loss. One theory, which came to be known as "Italygate," posited that Italian military satellites had interfered with American voting machines and switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Though far-fetched, multiple government agents looked into it: Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called U.S. officials in Rome to ask about the theory, and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, asking him to investigate.
Like all of Trump's other allegations about voter fraud in 2020, Italygate had no basis in reality. But just one election cycle later, on the opposite side of the aisle, a very similar conspiracy is taking shape.
"Swing states were able to use Starlink in order to tally up and to count ballot votes, or voting ballots, in their state," claimed TikTok user Etheria77 in a video that was also cross-posted to X last week, where as of this writing it has more than 4.5 million views. (TikTok removed the original video.) Over the course of the nine-minute video, Etheria77 posits that Elon Musk sent Starlink satellite internet terminals to swing states for use with vote tabulation, a task the terminals are not equipped to perform.
"There [are] absolutely zero reasons as to why those systems were connected to the internet," Etheria77 says. "[Voting] machines have absolutely no problem tallying up votes like they have done since the beginning of time."
By the way, Lancaster notes that Elon Must was pushing a debunked Dominion Voting Machine theory last month.
Elon, STFU; you'll get sued, and Dominion will wind up owning Tesla and SpaceX!
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But without Amtrak, how will all the fired NPR employees be able to leave D.C.? Nevertheless, Jason Russell takes on that easy target in Reason "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish Amtrak.
Who can resist the romance of the rails? The glorious train halls of old; the art deco travel posters; the hourslong stoppage between towns while the train has dysfunctional Wi-Fi, the cafe car is closed, and the stink of the bathroom by your seat is inescapable.
Such is often the reality on Amtrak these days. One January 2023 trip from the Washington, D.C., area to the Orlando area, scheduled for 17 hours, turned into a hellish ordeal: "Passengers had been cooped up in their seats or compartments for 37 hours, complaining of stale air, dwindling food supplies, trash piling up in the aisles and a lack of timely information from the crew," read the New York Times report.
So (again) here's hopin'.
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