Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

There is no end to the corruption.

The NY Times with an epic tale of pardon abuse:

Even amid the uproar over President Donald J. Trump’s freewheeling use of his pardon powers at the end of his term, one commutation stood out.

Jonathan Braun of New York had served just two and a half years of a decade-long sentence for running a massive marijuana ring, when Mr. Trump, at 12:51 a.m. on his last day in office, announced he would be freed.

Mr. Braun was, to say the least, an unusual candidate for clemency.

A Staten Islander with a history of violent threats, Mr. Braun had told a rabbi who owed him money: “I am going to make you bleed.” Mr. Braun’s family had told confidants they were willing to spend millions of dollars to get him out of prison.

At the time, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department and federal regulators, as well as New York state authorities, were still after him for his role in an entirely separate matter: his work as a predatory lender, making what judges later found were fraudulent and usurious loans to cash-strapped small businesses.

Nearly three years later, the consequences of Mr. Braun’s commutation are becoming clearer, raising new questions about how Mr. Trump intervened in criminal justice decisions and what he could do in a second term, when he would have the power to make good on his suggestions that he would free supporters convicted of storming the Capitol and possibly even to pardon himself if convicted of the federal charges he faces.

Just months after Mr. Trump freed him, Mr. Braun returned to working as a predatory lender, according to New York State’s attorney general. Two months ago, a New York state judge barred him from working in the industry. Weeks later, a federal judge, acting on a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, imposed a nationwide ban on him.

A New York Times investigation, drawing on documents and interviews with current and former officials, and others familiar with Mr. Braun’s case, found there were even greater ramifications stemming from the commutation than previously known and revealed new details about Mr. Braun’s history and how the commutation came about.

-The commutation dealt a substantial blow to an ambitious criminal investigation being led by the Justice Department’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan aimed at punishing members of the predatory lending industry who hurt small businesses. Mr. Braun and prosecutors were in negotiations over a cooperation deal in which he would be let out of prison in exchange for flipping on industry insiders and potentially even wearing a wire. But the commutation instantly destroyed the government’s leverage on Mr. Braun.The investigation into the industry, and Mr. Braun’s conduct, remains open but hampered by the lack of an insider.

-At multiple levels, up to the president, the justice system appeared to fail more than once to take full account of Mr. Braun’s activities. After pleading guilty to drug charges in 2011, Mr. Braun agreed to cooperate in a continuing investigation, allowing him to stay out of prison but under supervision for nine years — a period he used to establish himself as a predatory lender, making violent threats to those who owed him money, court filings show.Since returning to predatory lending after being freed, Mr. Braun is still engaging in deceptive business tactics, regulators and customers say.

-In working to secure his release, Mr. Braun’s family used a connection to Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, to try to get the matter before Mr. Trump. Jared Kushner’s White House office drafted the language used in the news release to announce commutations for Mr. Braun and others.

The man is a full-blown gangster who happened to know Jared so Trump granted him clemency. No vetting, no contrition, no nothing.

And look who the lawyer who secured it for him was:

As other convicts seeking clemency did, Mr. Braun’s family retained Alan Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer and Trump ally who worked with Jewish organizations pushing for pardons, at least one of which had received financial support from the Kushner family.

Mr. Dershowitz, who represented Mr. Trump in his first impeachment, had a direct line into Mr. Kushner’s office, and succeeded in helping win clemency from Mr. Trump for a number of other people. Mr. Dershowitz said he did not remember what steps he took to help Mr. Braun but said they were minimal.

The DOJ under Bill Barr knew the pardon process was completely corrupt but didn’t try to do much about it. The VP knew too and merely “opted” not to participate which was big of him. They just let it happen.

In case you were wondering why a marijuana offense would get such a sentence, get a load of his history:

Mr. Braun’s path to receiving a last-minute commutation began in 2009, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, raided what prosecutors said was a stash house for a marijuana smuggling ring run by Mr. Braun.

When Mr. Braun found out about the raid, he rented a car and drove 25 hours straight from Florida to an Indian reservation in upstate New York where, dressed in all black, he was smuggled into Canada, according to court filings. He then fled to Israel.

The Justice Department placed him on a special Interpol list that asked Israel to apprehend him. By 2010, he was back in New York, the Justice Department had charged him and he was behind bars.

In the days after his arrest, prosecutors asked a federal judge to keep him in jail until he went on trial. The prosecutors said Mr. Braun could not be deterred and was violent or willing to use the specter of violence against those who owed him money or might turn on him. Mr. Braun, the prosecutors said, had access to millions of dollars in untraceable cash, and was willing to do anything to stay out of prison.

The judge ordered that Mr. Braun be held pending trial. After nearly a year and a half in custody, Mr. Braun agreed to plead guilty. As part of the plea deal, he began cooperating secretly with the government’s investigations into other drug smugglers, particularly higher profile ones abroad, according to a former law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal workings of an investigation.

In exchange, the prosecutors agreed to release Mr. Braun from jail, putting him on house arrest and delaying his sentencing on the drug charges while they pursued new cases with his help. It is unclear what information Mr. Braun provided the authorities or whether it led to convictions.

Often, a cooperator can remain free for a few months by providing investigators with useful information. Sometimes, a court will hold off sentencing for a year or two as the cooperation continues. Throughout the process, federal authorities are supposed to monitor cooperators to ensure they do not break the law.

For reasons that remain unexplained, Mr. Braun was permitted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn to live relatively freely for nearly the next decade, and he was able to turn his focus to an enterprise rife with cash and threats: providing loans to struggling small businesses that often had nowhere else to turn.

Former prosecutors and defense lawyers said they had never heard of a defendant being allowed to delay sentencing for such a long period or using his freedom to engage in the conduct he did. A spokesman for the Brooklyn federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Mr. Braun’s case.

The business Mr. Braun entered is known by many names: the merchant cash advance industry, predatory lending or, in the view of some law enforcement officials, loan sharking.

Small businesses — like restaurants and contractors — have long faced a problem: They need cash on a daily basis to buy ingredients and supplies, and pay employees so they can operate while awaiting customer payments.

Banks often won’t lend to them, especially small firms with troubled credit histories, providing an opening for the merchant cash advance business to offer them financing on strict, sometimes usurious, terms that include high-interest rates and exorbitant fees. (Technically, they provide cash in exchange for a percentage of future revenues, an arrangement that typically gives them access to the borrower’s books and sometimes the borrower’s bank accounts.)

An examination of court records by The Times found that between when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn first let him out of prison in 2011 and when he reported to prison in 2020, Mr. Braun was accused of violently threatening eight people who owed him money. Another man accused Mr. Braun in a lawsuit of shoving him from the deck of a house in Staten Island in 2018.

Among those threatened was a real estate developer, who said Mr. Braun told him: “I will take your daughters from you,” according to court documents.

Another borrower said in an affidavit Mr. Braun told him, “Be thankful you’re not in New York, because your family would find you floating in the Hudson.”

Even as Mr. Braun was starting to become a threatening presence, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn actually gave him more freedom. In May 2017, prosecutors and probation officers approved Mr. Braun being removed from house arrest.

Five months later, Mr. Braun threatened the rabbi of a synagogue that had borrowed money from him, according to New York’s attorney general. Mr. Braun told the rabbi he would beat and “publicly embarrass him,” adding: “I am going to make you bleed” and “I will make you suffer for every penny.”

Nearly a decade after he was first charged in the drug case, prosecutors scheduled his sentencing. Anonymous letters accusing him of violent threats were then filed on the docket of the judge overseeing his case.

Despite his cooperation with the ongoing drug investigations, the judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Mr. Braun tried to appeal, but weeks before the pandemic hit in early 2020, he reported to the federal penitentiary in Otisville, N.Y.

[…]

It’s like Whitey Bulgar in Boston. He’s a psychopathic mobster who made a deal with the feds and they let him run free as long as he was “helping” them.

It got worse for him. He was sued by the Federal Trade Commission for his predatory lending (aka loan sharking.)Meanwhile the NYPD was putting together a big criminal case and thought they might be able to flip Braun which turned out to be a good bet. He agreed to whatever they wanted as long as he wasn’t prosecuted.

While all this was going on, Braun and his allies were trying to get him a pardon. And it turned out this criminal went to school with Jared in the inaugural class of Kushner Yeshiva High School in New Jersey. Jared’s daddy stepped. ( He is also an ex-con, by the way.)

In the chaotic final weeks of the Trump presidency, the volume of clemency requests overwhelmed the White House Counsel’s Office. Requests were being fielded by numerous White House officials — and many came in through Mr. Kushner’s office.

It is unclear what type of due diligence, if any, the White House did on Mr. Braun. The New York attorney general and the F.T.C. had put out news releases about their civil actions against him in June 2020, and the suits they filed were a matter of public record. An inquiry to the Justice Department could have revealed the plea deal discussions.

Just hours before Mr. Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, the White House sent out the news release, written by Mr. Kushner’s office, announcing Mr. Braun’s commutation, along with similar summaries for the 143 convicts who received pardons and commutations in the final batch, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Kushner thought it was important to honor each person granted clemency with a personalized write-up, the person said.

The feds in NY were pissed, as you can imagine. So much for their big predatory lending case.

In the weeks that followed, investigators made another attempt to reach a cooperation deal with Mr. Braun, meeting with him in person. But no longer needing help getting out of prison, Mr. Braun essentially called their bluff, signaling that if they thought they had a case against him they should indict him. Since then, the prosecutors have brought no charges against Mr. Braun or anyone else with ties to him in the industry.

Just a few months after his release, Mr. Braun returned to working in the merchant cash advance business.

Here’s a gift link for you to read what he’s been doing to innocent people who make the mistake of doing business with him. — since his pardon! He’s a gangster, through and through.

Trump no doubt sees himself in him:

“What is so bad about me?” he said in the interview with The Times. “I never hurt anybody, never did anything wrong to anybody.”

They’re all criminals. Trump is currently in a civil trial for committing massive fraud over many years to get lower interest rates and lower insurance premiums. He’s got 91 felony indictments awaiting him and was recently found liable for sexual assault to the tune of millions of dollars. His son-in-law is as corrupt as they come having used his white house perch to secure billions just months after he left Washington and did massive favors for his friends and family while in office. This is just one example and there are many more. (Remember when Trump pardoned war criminals?)

It’s obvious that about 40% the country doesn’t know about any of that and probably wouldn’t care if they did since it’s their Dear Leader and anything he does is, by definition, “smart.” But other’s might not be so sanguine. This is blatant corruption.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro agrees with me:

Josh Shapiro isn’t yet worried about President Joe Biden’s standing.

Rather, the governor of Pennsylvania attributes Biden’s recent polling slide behind former President Donald Trump to voter “brain fog” that he thinks will clear once the general election cycle kicks into gear.

“I’m not sure folks remember just how chaotic it was, how divisive it was, how he was just in your face in your living room every day,” Shapiro said, referring to Trump. “I don’t think people want to go back to that.”

[…]

“As people are reminded of what it was like and they are forced to tune back in and listen to that during the course of a presidential race, they’re going to reject his extremism, his chaos and his danger,” he said of Trump. 

I think he’s right. (I hope he’s right?) But it’s going to take effort to remind people about what it was really like. There is a lot to work with so there’s no excuse for failing to do it. And hopefully, with the reminder, the media will do its job and inform people of what he has in store for his second term. Repeatedly.

I know there are a lot of cross currents in the news right now which will affect the Democratic vote as well as the national vote. So anything can happen. But as long as Trump is on the ballot there is no choice. Hopefully most Americans will realize that.

They got power…

This interview with Tim Alberta is riveting. Highly recommend:

This is one of the most disturbing stories in American politics and there are a lot of them. We need to pay attention.

The influential Spanish language broadcaster isn’t kowtowing to the boss or to Trump

The Washington Post reports:

The most prominent U.S. journalist at Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language network, wrote Saturday that reporters had a moral obligation to ask hard questions of Donald Trump during his campaign to retake the White House.

Jorge Ramos devoted his weekly column to making that case in the wake of his network’s recent friendly interview with Trump, which was attended by three senior executives at Univision’s relatively new parent company. Ramos wrote that it had “put in doubt the independence of our news department.”

The column by Ramos, an influential anchor of Univision News since 1986, goes to 40 U.S. and Latin American newspapers, and he speaks on Univision Radio and other television shows. His most recent column, headlined “The Danger of Not Confronting Trump,” addressed the recent interview and recounted the ex-president’s separation of immigrant families and lies, including that he won the 2020 election.

“We cannot normalize behavior that threatens democracy and the Hispanic community, or offer Trump an open microphone to broadcast his falsehoods and conspiracy theories. We must question and fact-check everything he says,” Ramos wrote. Ramos has tangled with Trump before and was ejected from a news conference in 2015 after asking the candidate about his remarks denigrating immigrants.

Ramos’s comments are the latest fallout from the interview that was recorded on Nov. 7 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, in which a Mexico-based journalist conducting the interview did not challenge false statements by Trump, including assertions that he had built a wall on the border and that Mexico had effectively paid for it. The interview, which had many softball questions and was broadcast on Nov. 9, led to much criticism of Univision and its new owners. One prominent anchor, León Krauze, left the network in its aftermath.

Ramos didn’t say whether he would follow Krauze out the door but left open the possibility, writing that “for 39 years Univision has allowed me to report with absolute independence and freedom — and even to write columns like this one.” He added, “I will continue to do it as a free journalist, wherever I might be.”

The Trump broadcast was part of a broader shift in tone since Mexican media company Grupo Televisa, which works closely with Mexican political leaders, merged with Univision in 2021. Univision’s Miami station enthusiastically covered a Trump rally on Nov. 8 in Hialeah, Fla., that it described as “historic,” preempting a national show, and it canceled a planned Democratic response to the Trump interview, The Washington Post has reported.

Trump praised the new owners, saying they were “unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me.”

The coverage has alarmed Latino advocacy groups and Democrats, especially because Trump has been polling better among minority groups than during his previous runs. Hispanics are a large proportion of the electorate in Florida, Texas and California and a significant proportion in more closely contested states.

Former Univision president Joaquin Blaya called the Trump interview “a repudiation of the concept of separation of business and news,” and those still inside the newsroom have privately echoed the sentiment, complaining that it is a disservice to viewers and listeners.

As I noted earlier, Jared Kushner had something to do with this whole thing, which means that he’s benefiting in some way.

It’s not just Ramos:

The nation’s largest Spanish-language media company, Univision, faced growing backlash Friday for its handling of a recent interview with former president Donald Trump, as major Latino advocacy groups delivered a letter of protest to the network’s executives and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus prepared to request a meeting with the network.

Actor and comedian John Leguizamo, who recently took a turn as host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” also posted a video on Instagram on Thursday night calling for a boycott of the network until it stopped its rejection of Biden ads, some of which were canceled just before the Trump interview aired.

“I am asking all my brothers and sisters who are actors, artists, politicians, activists to not go on Univision,” he said in a message in English and Spanish.

The pushback comes after a Nov. 7 interview with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida that was arranged with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and attended by a trio of senior executives at Univision’s parent company. The interview was notable for its gracious tone, lack of follow-up questions and Trump’s assertion in the first minutes about owners of the network.

“They like me,” Trump said.

Why??? Why do they like him?

This is just ridiculous:

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie on Sunday sought to play down the potential consequences if rival Donald Trump loses the 2024 primary race but refuses to concede — or even keeps running as a third-party candidate.

“No one will expect him to concede. He hasn’t conceded the 2020 election. Who cares,” Christie, a former governor of New Jersey and a Trump supporter-turned-critic, told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

While Trump maintains a huge lead in national polling of Republican primary voters, he is in a slightly weaker front-runner position according to surveys in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote, where Christie and other challengers are hoping for an upset.

Pressed by Karl on how Trump’s continued presence in the race could be an ongoing problem if he loses — like if he contests the results or runs third-party — Christie dismissed that notion, arguing that at that point, “the public en masse will begin to ignore” the former president because of his repeated defeats at the ballot box.

“I think he’ll go back to Mar-a-Lago. He’ll continue to carp and moan and complain and say we don’t deserve him,” Christie said. “Anything that gets him out of this race and keeps him out of the White House is fine by me.”

Christe’s reaction comes as ABC News has learned Americans for Prosperity Action — an advocacy organization backed by Republican billionaire Charles Koch and his allies — has plans to endorse an alternative candidate to Trump with the Jan. 15 Iowa caucus now just 50 days away.

With an estimated $70 million on hand to pour into the effort to defeat the former president, Americans for Prosperity also has research that suggests “as many as 75% of Republicans just might be open to a Trump alternative if they think that that person can win,” ABC News Political Director Rick Klein told Karl on Sunday.

Trump has so far commanded the Republican field, but Klein said his comparatively weaker early state polling could give other candidates hope that “once people start to engage,” there’s a chance of eating into his lead.

Christie has to say this because if he told the truth it would show that his campaign is not about winning anything unless Trump keels over on the golf course before the election. And even then I’m pretty sure that Trump’s cult would not vote for him instead.

No, the truth, as Christie well knows, is that if Trump somehow loses the primary (very unlikely) he will take his cult and go home. He’ll say it was stolen and at least 20% of the Republican party won’t vote. That’s the reality they are all facing.

I don’t know any teacher who doesn’t think they are making classroom education nearly impossible. It is a crisis:

Social media, the U.S. surgeon general wrote in an advisory this year, might be linked to the growing mental health crisis among teens. And even if this link turns out to be weaker than some recent research suggests, smartphones are undoubtedly a classroom distraction.

Understandably, individual schools and school districts — in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere — are trying to crack down on smartphones. Students are required to store the devices in backpacks or lockers during classes, or to place them in magnetic locking pouches. In 2024, these efforts should go even further: Impose an outright ban on bringing cellphones to school, which parents should welcome and support.

In educational settings, smartphones have an almost entirely negative impact: Educators and students alike note they can fuel cyberbullying and stifle meaningful in-person interaction. A 14-country study cited by UNESCO found that the mere presence of a mobile phone nearby was enough to distract students from learning. It can take up to 20 minutes for students to refocus.

Education Department data suggest that a majority of schools prohibit nonacademic cellphone use during school hours, but the enforcement of those policies is often lax — teachers can’t confront every student or confiscate every device; some report students request bathroom breaks to check their notifications in the stalls. Phones are still in hand between classes, at lunch and recess, and often during instructional time despite putative bans — 97 percent of teens report using their phones during the school day, mostly for nonacademic purposes.

Forty-three percent of 8-to-12-year-olds own a smartphone, as do 88 percent of teens 13 to 18, according to the 2021 Common Sense Census. But most didn’t buy one themselves. The most ardent opponents of all-day device bans tend to be parents. Some are “enraged,” as one mother in Charlottesville told the Daily Progress, at the idea of cellphone limitations, insisting on the need to remain in contact with their children: to arrange pickups and dropoffs, keep track of their whereabouts or otherwise be in touch.

These are not totally trivial concerns. Indeed, parents and students these days have to worry about staying connected in the event of a school shooting. (As one nervous eighth-grader told a Post reporter: “I’m afraid that if something happens, I won’t be able to contact anyone. … Worst-case scenario: You can at least say goodbye.”) For the most part, though, it’s safer for students to focus on their surroundings during a crisis, not devices. The better solution to this tragic dilemma is prevent shootings in the first place with common-sense gun control policies.

For less dire — and far more common — emergencies, students would be better served by learning how to deal with a forgotten assignment or extracurricular themselves. And if there’s a true need to communicate with home, there’s always the option of using the school office’s landline, as students have done for decades.

[…]

[T]here is still a lack of robust data to suggest that digital technology inherently adds value to education, said UNESCO in its 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report. Much of the research that does exist was funded by private companies trying to create a market for their own digital learning products.

The same UNESCO report calls for a ban on smartphones at school no matter what age the user, and recommends it worldwide. This would reinforce a “human-centered” vision of education, the report says. Countries that have already adopted such policies have seen positive results; reductions in bullying in Spain and improved academic performance in Norway and Belgium. The United States would do well to follow their lead.

In the face of today’s evidence, one could plausibly argue that children shouldn’t have access to smartphones at all. But at least keeping the devices out of schools? It’s an idea whose time has come.

Unfortunately, one of the main arguments for allowing kids to have cell phones in class is that parents are paranoid that some nut is going to shoot up the school and they want their kids to be able to call them.

That’s how sick we are. But there should be another way. There has to be another way.

The future is fun! The future is fair!

Some of us have learned to refrain from issuing hot takes on developing stories. Yes, sometimes it’s infuriating when the press holds back from stating the obvious. I still recall the hour or more of “we don’t know what happened yet” reporting when the Challenger exploded (1986) shortly after launch, even as TV ran and re-ran footage of the explosion and we watched the detached bosters, still firing, fly wildy across the sky. Other times, as in last week’s Canada/U.S. border crash, there is a race to sensationalize in the absence of facts.

Will Bunch opens his Sunday column with an Orwell quote:

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984

The lie that the bridge crash was a terrorist attack from Canada spread before the flames from the burning Bentley subsided. First the truth:

Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants.

The FBI and police naturally had to rule out terrorism before turning to that more mundane explanation. But before the facts became known, outlets like Fox ran with fear-mongering speculation.

“What I’ve been told is that this was an attempted terrorist attack,” said Alexis McAdams, a correspondent for Fox News, the right-slanted network that despite a series of scandals and mishaps is still the most-watched cable news channel. Reporting just two and a half hours after the crash, McAdams added that her law enforcement sources believed that the motorists — in reality, remember, two middle-aged KISS fans — “have packed that car full of explosives.”

A-a-a-nd the demagogues were off:

“We need to lock down the borders immediately,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posed on X/Twitter Wednesday. “Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” Added another Florida Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds, in a now deleted tweet: “Open borders, soft-on-crime policies and bending a knee to the woke P.C. mob is an inevitable threat to our nation and its people. Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.”

The website Meidas Touch published a list of more than 30 Republican officials or right-wing luminaries who tweeted similar sentiments and occasionally embellished their posts with new made-up details, like the discovery of an Iranian passport at the crash site. Some of these posts are still up, days after it became clear that the Niagara Falls crash was just a horrific tragedy and not the far-right’s fever dream of Islamic jihad to justify a repressive response. Others, including Fox News, have ripped yet another page from George Orwell’s 1984 — tossing their initial reporting down a memory hole.

Except what my post below suggests is that, like discredited scientific studies, discredited “news” will persist in cyberspace and be cited as true facts obscured by a government coverup for years to come. It works for them.

This kind of propaganda is designed to further destabilize the country and to prepare it for a strong man, even if it’s not Donald Trump.

For millions of U.S. web surfers and couch potatoes, the mental connection of Biden, the border and fiery chaos had already been implanted, and it will remain even as some of the erroneous tweets are deleted. And that sense that things are out of control in America is already being used to sell them on a rule-breaking strongman in the White House. That will be used in a Trump 47 presidency to actually carry out Luna’s howling at the moon, to deport so many migrants that America will need a gulag archipelago of camps to hold them.

The Niagara Falls panic didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the same week that Argentina elected a right-wing extremist president in Javier Milei, that the anti-immigration party of radical Geert Wilders won the most seats in the Netherlands parliament, that a fake rumor about the immigration status of a stabbing attacker sparked a destructive riot in Dublin — and that polls show Trump edging into the lead over Biden ahead of 2024′s election.

We can see where the right wants to take the country. But let’s not get out over our skis about those Trump-Biden polls. Like polling about the economy, they are likely skewed by Republican respondents’ same tribal detachment from reality about the economy:

A pair of economists who examined decades of polling data concluded, “While both Republicans and Democrats view the economy more favorably when their party controls the White House, the magnitude of this partisan bias is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans than for Democrats.”

Factor that two and a half times into reading any polling about the 2024 election. It’s a feature, not a bug. Truth and pants, you know?

The Doctor is AI

Forget that we cannot trust self-driving cars and that those flying ones we were promised remain elusive. Two random items this morning reinforce concerns about AI.

This one:

Followed by this one:

Science is an imperfect process, the Hill opinion notes. “Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds.” The problem is that those zombie studies do not disappear simply because they’ve been retrcated. They continue to be cited “unwittingly“:

Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage.

AI relying on undigitized medical knowledge from 1853 may seem unlikely. But relying on 40,000 retracted studies still floating around?

I dredged this up from the summer based on a comment in the Blue Sky thread:

Cigna is using an algorithm to review — and often reject — hundreds of thousands of patient health insurance claims, a new lawsuit claims, with doctors rubber-stamping those denials without individually reviewing each case. 

{…}

The litigation highlights the growing use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to handle tasks that were once routinely handled by human workers. At issue in health care is whether a computer program can provide the kind of “thorough, fair, and objective” decision that a human medical professional would bring in evaluating a patient’s claim. 

“Relying on the PXDX system, Cigna’s doctors instantly reject claims on medical grounds without ever opening patient files, leaving thousands of patients effectively without coverage and with unexpected bills,” the suit alleges.

The Doctor is AI:

“The chatbot is here to see you” (Politico):

Right now, no fewer than half of health care organizations are planning to use some kind of generative AI pilot program this year, according to a recent report by consulting firm Accenture. Some could involve patients directly. AI could make it easier for patients to understand a providers’ note, or listen to visits and summarize them.

But what about… you know, actual doctoring? So far, in limited research, chatbots have proven decent at asking simple health questions. Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and Stanford recently asked ChatGPT 25 questions on heart disease prevention. Its responses were appropriate for 21 of 25, including on how to lose weight and reduce cholesterol.

But it stumbled on more nuanced questions, including in one instance “firmly recommending” cardio and weightlifting, which could be dangerous for some patients.

Steven Lin, a physician and executive director of the Stanford Healthcare AI Applied Research Team, said that the models are fairly solid at getting things like medical school test questions right. However, in the real world, questions from patients are often messy and incomplete, Lin said, unlike the structured questions on exams.

I remain skeptical.

And can you blame them?

TPM reports:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is experiencing some political repercussions for dumping gasoline on his fractured party’s descent into dysfunction when he ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the sin of keeping the government open. While the congressman is still popular in his Panhandle home district, his standing in Florida overall is in a state of disrepair.

The Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab released the results of statewide polling it conducted between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 last week. It found that 57 percent of Florida voters are unhappy with Gaetz’s job as a congressman. That means that just 21 percent of voters surveyed approved of the congressman’s performance in Washington. About eight percent were “neutral” and 14 percent indicated they didn’t know how they felt, per the poll results.

When broken down by party, his approval rating is only a little less bleak. Among Democrats surveyed, almost 83 percent said they disapprove of the professional antagonist. But among Republicans, 36.3 percent disapprove of the congressman, with just 36.6 percent approving of his “work.” That’s less than the percentage of Republicans who responded to the same survey saying they approved of the decision to remove McCarthy as speaker — 42 percent. The Florida Atlantic University poll surveyed just under 1,000 Florida voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2%.

While Gaetz’s popularity in his home district is holding steady, his statewide disapproval follows news that the Republican may be interested in running for governor in 2026 when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is term-limited out of the governor’s mansion. NBC News reported in September that the congressman was “100 percent in” on a potential 2026 bid. Gaetz has denied that reporting, offering only that his sole “political focus right now is Trump 2024.

I won’t be surprised if he becomes Governor at some point, to tell you the truth. Florida has an incredibly record of electing creeps like Gaetz.