Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Did you know it’s illegal to knowingly broadcast false information about a catastrophe, especially if such communications may cause substantial “public harm?”

Public harm includes direct & actual damages to people or property & the diversion of law enforcement or public health & safety authorities from their duties.

Link to FCC rules on FALSE INFORMATION/BROADCAST HOAXES https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/guides/hoaxes

But Elon Musk & X are not regulated by the FCC. So, HOW DO WE STOP THIS?

Make it illegal, just like we did for broadcast TV and radio.

I know that the internet is not subject to the same laws as broadcast radio & TV. But we can create them.

We can use the same criteria that the FCC uses, which will protect people who spread the false information unintentionally. But to just ignore it is to abdicate the need to protect people during this vulnerable time.

Dash, on Mastodon pointed out some of the reasons why Musk is getting away with this. He also understood that this is a call for a change

@CatDragon @spocko because the internet isn’t subject to the same laws as broadcast tv (so he isn’t breaking the law). And republicans won’t agree to any additional regulations, particularly when they benefit from spreading disinformation themselves.

Also Dash wrote:
social media companies aren’t broadcasters though (according to the government). The law won’t apply to them.

I think this post is meant to encourage us to consider lobbying for a change in how internet companies are regulated. And I agree with that initiative.

@dashrb@awscommunity.social

Post by @spocko@mastodon.online

View on Mastodon

Make knowingly spreading false information on social media illegal, just like we did for broadcast TV and radio.

I know a lot about FCC law and what is and is not enforced. I also know that the broadcast radio & TV companies spent a lot of time and money to weaken the regulations, but also to protect themselves from fines and possibly losing licenses. For example they implementes 7 second delays, they file appeals for accidents they could not control. They fire people who are repeat offenders.

We might mock the obscenity restrictions on broadcast radio and TV now, but at the time enough people decided it was a problem, and took steps to limit it.

Public harm following people knowingly posting false information has already happened. In a catastrophe “the diversion of law enforcement or public health & safety authorities from their duties.” can lead to “direct & actual damages to people or property.”

We know the social media companies will do & say whatever they can to avoid being held responsible for what is said on their platforms.

Musk will go on about “free speech” but knowingly posting false information in this situation does not contribute to the “marketplace of ideas.” It’s a condemnable act, and it should be made criminal.

Cross posted on Spocko’s Brain

Oh look. Here’s Ron DeSantis’s hardcore MAGA spokeswoman discovering that the disinformation culture she has cultivated for years now may not be such a great idea:

That stuff is clogging the Twitter sewer right now and the Republican leaders in these disaster area are starting to realize that it’s affecting their own voters. If they’d understood this during COVID, studies show that many lives could have been spared.

This is the result of the MAGA death cult exploiting conspiracy theories for their own ends and killing people in the process. For the sake of Florida citizens I hope this time they do not listen.

Meidas Touch reports:

After his VP debate, JD Vance went fishing with a pro-Trump trophy hunter group that publishes kills of endangered animals including pygmy hippos like Moo Deng, the adorable and feisty pygmy hippo baby that has gone viral across the internet.

The pro-trophy hunting group, Safari Club International (SCI), organized a fishing trip for Vance in Michigan before recording an interview for the MAGA Republican Ruthless podcast.

Phony weirdoJD had this to say about the group:

“I think something that people don’t fully appreciate, especially far lefties who pretend to care about the environment, is they assume that these guys just want to take, take, take from the environment. Like they want to kill every animal. They want to get every fish out of the lake and they want to take them home and they don’t think about conservation. When in reality the people who are hunting and fishing they care the most about conservation. They care about the balance I think more than people who never spend any real time in the environment.”

He is lying. These people may want to keep fish in the lake but they make big bucks taking people on safaris to kill endangered and threatened species:

Vance’s statement attempts to paint his political opponents as extreme and the trophy hunters he is cozying up to as as conservationists. Meanwhile, SCI maintains hunting records for endangered animals including the pygmy hippo. SCI’s record books rank these kills and provides a high score dashboard for trophy hunters.

This does not surprise me considering that JD Vance is super close to Don Jr and Eric, both of whom are big trophy hunters

Gross;

Various photos show the brothers flanking a crocodile hanging from a tree, smiling behind the horns of a killed waterbuck, and standing together as Eric held a dead leopard. Donald Trump Jr. was pictured sitting next to a dead buffalo while holding a gun and wearing an ammunition belt, and Eric Trump can be seen sitting on one of the dead animals with guns resting on its horns.

The Trump brothers were not pictured with any dead lions in 2012, but Donald Trump Jr. was pictured next to a dead elephant while holding its severed tail.

JD just wanted to say that environmentalists are all a bunch of citified wimps who don’t know how to be real men. It’s typical of him. But these people are monsters and they really do want to destroy the planet with policies that will pretty much kill it. And that includes the fish and game they say they want to preserve so they can kill them.

As president, Trump withheld Covid supplies from US states, but sent Covid tests to Putin.
Hard to believe this guy is still a coin flip away from a second term. pic.twitter.com/N8Fk6BeccE

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) October 8, 2024

As Tom mentioned this morning, Bob Woodward has a new book out and its full of juicy revelations as usual. CNN reports that there’s some good stuff about Biden in it — he calls Netanyahu a “son of a bitch” and a “bad fucking guy” which is actually a relief. At least the “unwavering” support for Israel’s ongoing ultraviolence isn’t based upon Biden’s inexplicable regard for Bibi.

Biden has also reportedly said that he regrets naming Garland as AG because of the persecution of Hunter which I think is fair enough (although there are other reasons for wishing there had been a different AG during this period as well.)

But it’s the Trump stuff that really grabs:

The book also contains new details about Trump’s relationship with the Russian president. In 2020, Woodward writes, Trump had “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.”

During the height of the pandemic, Russia and the United States did exchange medical equipment such as ventilators. But Putin — who infamously isolated himself over fears of Covid — told Trump on a phone call to keep the delivery of the Abbott machines quiet, Woodward reports.

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.

“I don’t care,” Trump replied. “Fine.”

“No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”

Woodward writes that Trump has stayed in touch with Putin after leaving office.

In one scene, Woodward recounts a moment at Mar-a-Lago where Trump tells a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.

Remember, Trump was sitting on boxes full of stolen classified information during this period.

Well ok then.

He always lies and when caught just doubles down:

After Donald Trump was asked in a Monday interview about the future prospects of Gaza, the former president made a curious claim: “You know, I’ve been there, and it’s rough.”

There is no public evidence of Trump ever having been to Gaza, which has been governed by militant group Hamas since 2007. He certainly didn’t go to Gaza as president, and CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have all found no proof he made a prior visit. Perhaps he merely meant he has been to Palestinian territory, since he did visit the West Bank in 2017? Or maybe he was just talking about having been to the broader region?

Nope.

Trump’s campaign said Monday night that he meant what he said about having been to Gaza in particular – and the campaign insisted the claim is true. “President Trump has been to Gaza previously and has always worked to ensure peace in the Middle East,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CNN. Leavitt, though, did not provide a single detail about Trump’s supposed trip to Gaza. And she did not respond when we repeatedly asked for even the most basic information, like the year of the supposed visit.

So we were highly skeptical – because Trump has a long history of making things up, because of the lack of public evidence, because the Times of Israel has reported that Trump had never even visited Israel before his presidency, and because the Trump campaign had offered a substantively different comment to The New York Times earlier Monday. That earlier comment, which a campaign official provided only on condition of anonymity, did not say Trump had actually been to Gaza. Instead, the anonymous campaign official tried some spin, correctly saying that Trump has been to Israel but wrongly saying, “Gaza is in Israel.”

We asked three former Trump officials who worked on Middle East policy whether they know of any proof for the former president’s claim, and the campaign’s claim to CNN, that Trump has been to Gaza itself. The only one who has responded, Trump-appointed former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker, said in an email: “As far as I know, he’s never traveled there. He did not go in 2017 when he visited Israel. I think this story is probably already over.” […]

They could not find any former staffers who could verify Trump’s claim. And guess what? He’s doubling down:

Trump aides told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday that the former president privately said he did.

Of course he did.

Here are some more lies from that one interview with Hugh Hewitt:

Terrorist attacks: Trump repeated his false claim that “we didn’t have one terrorist attack” during his presidency. There were multiple terrorist attacks during his presidency, including some he has spoken about himself.

The defeat of ISIS: Trump repeated his false claim that although others said it would take years to “get rid of” the ISIS terror group, “I got rid of it in a month.” Leaving aside the fact that Trump certainly doesn’t deserve sole credit, the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency.

Iran and funding for terror groups: Trump repeated his false claim that Iran did not fund terror groups during his presidency: “They weren’t giving any money, because they had no money.” Iran’s funding for entities designated by the US government as terror groups, like Hezbollah and Hamas, did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped – as Trump’s own administration acknowledged in 2020.

China’s oil purchases from Iran: Trump repeated his false claim that he successfully pressured Chinese leader Xi Jinping into ending oil purchases from Iran; Trump claimed, “He said, ‘I’ll pass.’ He passed. Everybody passed. They did no business.” China’s oil purchases from Iran briefly plummeted in 2019, but they never stopped, and they quickly rebounded while Trump was still president – back up to hundreds of thousands of barrels per day.

Nuclear weapons: Repeating a false claim he made during his presidency, Trump said, “I rebuilt our entire nuclear force.” He simply did not do so, though he did undertake efforts to modernize the US arsenal. “Long story short: then, as now, Trump’s nuclear braggadocio is utter fantasy, wholly divorced from reality,” said Stephen Schwartz, an independent expert on US nuclear weapons policy. “And not only did he not rebuild ‘our entire nuclear force,’ on his watch the total operational nuclear stockpile of warheads and bombs actually decreased by about 100 weapons!”

Global warming and sea levels: Trump delivered another version of his usual false claim about global warming, minimizing the threat by saying it will cause the ocean to rise merely “1/8th of an inch in the next 500 years.” Sea levels are currently rising more than an eighth of an inch per year.

Harris, immigrants and crime: Trump repeated his false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the presidential election, let in 13,000 murderers and 425,000 criminals over the border. The statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration; rather, they cover numerous presidential administrations, including his own, over the span of decades – “over the past 40 years or more,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a September statement to CNN. You can read more here.

Pelosi and a stock sale: Trump falsely claimed that the former speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, sold stock in Visa “the day before the lawsuit” that was filed against the company by the Justice Department in September. An official disclosure shows the stock was actually sold by Pelosi’s husband more than two and a half months before the Justice Department filed the lawsuit.

Biden and foreign income: Trump repeated his false claim that President Joe Biden “gets a lot of money from China, or he got a lot of money from China, tremendous amount of money.” After years of investigation by House Republicans, there is still no evidence Biden has received any payments from China.

Chris Wallace in 2020: Trump repeated his false claim that journalist Chris Wallace, now of CNN and formerly of Fox News, tried to stop him, during a presidential debate Wallace moderated in 2020, from asking Biden about a supposed payment from the mayor of Moscow’s wife (which actually went to a company connected to Biden’s son Hunter Biden, not to the president); Trump claimed, “And Chris Wallace wouldn’t let me ask. (Biden) couldn’t answer the question. Chris Wallace stepped in and said, ‘Well, we’re not going to be talking about that.’”

Wallace never said anything like that. As the transcript shows, Wallace interjected during this debate exchange to try to get Trump to allow Biden to answer Trump’s question about the money, not to stop Trump from talking about the subject.

Military equipment surrendered to the Taliban: Trump repeated his false claim that $85 billion in US military equipment was left to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden and Harris. Trump’s figure is a massive exaggeration; the Pentagon has estimated that this equipment was worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021.

This spoiled narcissist who had everything handed to him on silver platter by his rich father (after which he lost most of it because of his terrible business judgment) has always told people that he made it on his own. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve mentioned it before but once again, if you want to read one more book about this miscreant make it “Lucky Loser” by the NY Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. It shows the scope of Trump’s failures and how he was really rescued by reality TV which created the persona that brought him to the White House. He’s no more authentic than a Real Housewife of New York.

Here’s the publisher’s note:

Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.” Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country. Except: None of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.

Drawing on over twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information, including the tax returns he tried to conceal, alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump’s financial rise and fall, and rise and fall again. For decades, he squanders his fortunes on money losing businesses, only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacks his name above the door of every building, while taking out huge loans he’ll never repay. He obsesses over appearances, while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnishes the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and cheats the television producer who not only rescues him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business savant – the public image that will carry him to the White House. 

It’s unthinkable that with all we know about him, this dishonest, vengeful loser could be back in the White House in less that 6 months.

Why? I hate to say it but …

Yesterday we talked to a Trump supporter wearing an “I’m Voting Felon 2024” shirt who said Law and Order is important. pic.twitter.com/zv6jBJKUa1

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) June 19, 2024

This person says immigrants will come live in your house with you if Kamala wins. pic.twitter.com/WpaCJmAzIf

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) October 3, 2024

This person doesn’t want anybody to protest at Trump rallies. pic.twitter.com/w0QxnLLJOB

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) September 3, 2024

Are these people Donald Trump’s sources for the debate? pic.twitter.com/pqIprNJFmR

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) September 11, 2024

Tens of millions of our fellow Americans are in a cult.

Pelley on Trump's 60-minute interview: "A week ago, Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First, it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story. Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020." pic.twitter.com/AxOGr6R0TA

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 8, 2024

Whew. That was brutal. But fair.

Hey, remember when JD Vance weirdly went on about the Biden administration’s alleged censorship during the debate with Tim Walz in order to evade saying whether the 2020 election was stolen? Yeah. They’re all very, very shrill on the subject complaining about Democrats allegedly destroying the 1st Amendment. It’s one of their major memes. And yet …

Get a load of this from Josh Marshall:

Florida has become the state where elements of a future second Trump presidency America already comes into view. We’re seeing some of these things happening right now in Florida. The example I’m about to share with you legitimately shocked me. (That’s a high bar.) It’s about the pro-choice ballot amendment which would restore Roe protections in Florida if it reaches a 60% threshold. As in most other states, getting to 50% isn’t that difficult. 60% is much harder.

To head off even the chance that the ballot initiative might hit that challenging high bar the state of Florida is already spending a substantial amount of tax payer dollars campaigning against the initiative. Now we learn that the state is quite literally threatening jail time for the employees of stations that agree to run one of the ads for the pro-choice amendment. You heard that right – not sue under some claim of defamation but actual criminal charges.

DeSantis will do anything to stop the pro-choice amendment from winning, And that apparently includes jailing journalists who run ads advocating for it. First Amendment for dummies.

Here’s the ad, by the way:

DeSantis’ reasoning as to why the ad is untruthful and should be taken off the air is that the law states that an abortion an only be done to save the woman’s life and in this case, because she has brain cancer, it would only extend it.

MY GOD.

Josh is right that this is a precursor to what we’ll see in a Trump administration. He’s already repeatedly threatened to take away the licenses of CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN for reporting news he doesn’t like. His mantra is “fake news” and “enemey of the people.” In his first administration he tried to tank the merger deal between At&T and Time Warner because he hates CNN. (CNN was owned by Time Warner.) I’m guessing there won’t be any “guardrails” on that in a second one.

Just look at what Elon Musk is doing on Twitter. He screeches about censorship and free speech even saying that the 2nd Amendment protects the first at that embarrassing Trump rally on Sunday. This is the excuse he uses to allow Nazis and foreign bots run wild on the platform dispensing massive amounts of disinformation. But he also freely bans people for posting things he doesn’t like, such as the fellow who posted a link to the emails Iran hacked from the Trump campaign. And it’s clear that he’s using the algorithm to boost his own posts which are filled with disinformation as well.

Watch Jon Stewart take Musk apart in this clip from the Daily Show last night:

Jon Stewart on Elon Musk, election interference, and whether guns protect free speech pic.twitter.com/0Hm0KKzOhP

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 8, 2024

Trump, Vance, DeSantis, Musk — they aren’t trying to hide what they plan to do in the future if they gain political power. They want to jail people for exercising their first amendment rights in the name of fighting censorship. Seriously.

Secretly. So says Bob Woodward’s new book

Bob Woodward’s new book alleges that Donald Trump “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” during 2020 testing shortages. That’s even as FEMA fends off false MAGA allegations that FEMA diverted Hurricane Helene disaster monies aid migrants.

The Washington Post reports:

As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted teststo Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”

Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.

In 2020, Woodward writes, Trump had “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.”

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.https://t.co/9avpfIWKEp

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) October 8, 2024

How many Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines are there in a bunch?

How will Helene impact the presidential election in North Carolina?

“To be determined” is the simple answer.

Hurricane Helene has upset many residents’ fall plans in western North Carolina, among which are plans for early voting set to begin on October 17. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is urging the annual inmigration of fall “leaf peepers” to stay home and away from the disaster area. Local businesses who count on that trade may not have beds or power or water for them anyway. Hotels are filled with relief workers or people whose homes are unlivable or gone. Local election boards will have to alter election plans that under normal circumstances are unalterable once submitted and approved by the state’s Board of Elections in August.

Permisssion for altering the unalterable came on Monday (Democracy Docket):

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) unanimously passed a resolution Monday allowing special accommodations for voters in the 13 counties most impacted by Hurricane Helene.

Karen Brinson Bell, NCSBE’s executive director, began the Monday morning meeting with a status update.

“What a difference a week makes,” Brinson Bell said. “When we were last together to consider the emergency authority regarding absentee board meeting schedules for these affected counties, we were looking at 14 offices that could still not open for work or to the public, and today, all county offices are open in North Carolina, and this is just quite the feat.”

However, she said many voters and election workers still face numerous struggles in the storm’s aftermath. One of the board members, Stacy Eggers IV, said that he has visited five of the counties impacted and has seen the damage firsthand.

“These areas received over 20 inches of rain in less than about 36 hours,” Eggers said. “As of today, we still have over 100,000 North Carolinians without power. Communication is significantly limited, and our roads remain in a crippled state.”

The five-member board determined that in multiple western North Carolina counties — Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga and Yancey — the “infrastructure for elections administration and voters’ accessibility to polling places and mail service” was “severely disrupted as a result of the disaster.”

Therefore, the board members passed a resolution to allow election boards in these counties to make changes with a “bipartisan majority vote.” 

They can amend their early voting plans — like adding or removing voting sites and changing hours or days that sites are open — and modify their Election Day polling places. 

On Nov. 5, these counties can establish voting sites for a precinct outside of the actual precinct. If a county doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate an Election Day site in a certain precinct, they can create a site in a different area or county for their voters to go to.

Also, the election boards in these counties can bring in election officials and poll workers who are registered voters and residents of other North Carolina counties.

Additionally, county boards can make accommodations for absentee voters. They can process absentee ballot requests until the day before Election Day. Without this change, the request deadline would’ve been Oct. 29.

Under the proposal, voters in these counties can now hand-deliver their absentee ballots to any Election Day voting site by 7:30 p.m. that day. Otherwise, they would only be allowed to submit them to their county’s election office. 

Voters can also return their ballots to a different North Carolina county’s election board by 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 if they were displaced to another county after the storm.

Only two of those 13 are “blue counties” (Buncombe and Watauga). The rest are pretty solidly red, and their combined populations are over 100,000 more than the blues. Republicans in Raleigh could balk at plans that would allow Buncombe (Asheville) and Watauga (Boone, Appalachian State) flexibility for citizens to access voting sites post-Helene, but they could be shooting themselves in the foot to try.

Of course, voters here in Asheville will crawl over broken glass to vote beginning next week (as many as possible on Day1, please). Fourteen early voting sites were planned in Buncombe County. How many remain in operational condition and accessible after the flooding is under review. Some of the 80 Election Day precincts may have to be moved or combined. Giving advance notice to voters (given that informational literature is already printed) will prove a challenge, but there are still weeks to tackle that problem. Buncombe’s local Board will meet today to draft Plan B.

What’s not clear is what happens in other counties. Watauga (which saw extensive flooding) planned for five EV sites. The rest of the 13 have two EV sites at best.

Democrats’ plans for seeing North Carolina go blue could turn on voting access here in the west and on which voters can and cannot access voting by Nov. 5