Man this week was long. Can’t wait to chill out this weekend!
Interesting…
Trump not entitled to immunity from civil suits over Capitol attack, says DoJ
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/02/trump-immunity-capitol-attack-justice-department
Get your shit together home state
Ohio takes crucial step towards public vote that could secure right to abortion
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/02/ohio-abortion-ballot-initiative-petition-approved
Ooh, keep me posted on the verdict today!
Alex Murdaugh found guilty in murder of wife, son; sentencing Friday
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/02/murdaugh-trial-verdict-deaths-crimes/
Whoa
Have an awesome day!!
Just FYI, the Sugar Bowl Resort is just south of the famous Donner Pass. I hope none of the employees got any ideas.
Food You Can Eat?
Or, for the crafty…
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/balenciaga-human-skin-jacket/
The name commemorates the time a magical nanny drifted down from the sky bearing a sugar bowl, singing “A spoonful of sugar helps the human flesh go down!”
https://wgme.com/amp/news/local/behavioral-health-liaison-amelia-smith-south-portland-woman-life-police-mental
A lot of our local PDs are incorporating behavioral health teams that respond to calls and look for solutions other than taking someone to jail for being disruptive. This situation could have easily escalated to where the woman engaged officers and got herself shot.
That’s a much better ending to the story than it usually does (even in Canada.)
These approaches are obviously better for the people in trouble, and they’re also much better for the cops. There are a lot of reasons why so many cops are knuckleheads, but one of many is that they’re constantly expected to handle situations completely outside of their training.
It’s becoming the model in my area, and it makes my job easier because I have fewer people coming to jail because of a mental health crisis.
My local police also are doing what’s basically a pre-intervention process where people can discuss triggers, behaviors, preferred care locations, etc, with the social worker and police department for folks with some risks of mental health crises.
While it won’t work for every call, the hope is that for some calls it will be better for the person involved and have fewer escalations. Also I suspect the hope is as cops read more about local folks it might help contextualize “this is what a mental health crisis can look like” so in general they’re better prepared and less likely to escalate on their ends.
Does anyone have a good answer as to why the Murdaugh trial is huge, hour-topping and show-leading national news? It’s kind of an interesting case, but why has so much time and ink been spent on this?
I think it’s because interfamilial homicide is always an attention grabber. I was just watching a documentary about Dominick Dunne, made when he was still alive and he was the primary interview subject. The hook was that he was at the time covering the Phil Spector trial, but they rehashed his greatest hits, starting with the murder of his own daughter, Dominique, and then OJ of course, and then the Menendez brothers. I had completely forgotten about them, but I flashed back to that time when the whole country seemed obsessed. Just to refresh, they killed their parents.
In the Murdaugh case there was also the mysterious death of the housekeeper, the manslaughter via drunken boating outing of the friend of the son, the financial chicanery, the “local royalty” angle, there was lots to unpack. Poor Gabby Petito is once again in the news. Killed by her boyfriend who went on to kill himself. Domestic violence that escalates into homicide is all too common, but that story had a disappearance, many crackpot theories, camper-vanning around various western National Parks, the return to Florida of the boyfriend, the extremely unsympathetic parents of the boyfriend…
It’s what makes the Old Testament such a compelling read. Cain and Abel. Noah and his sons. Abraham and Isaac.
You left out the hit Murdaugh ordered on himself to collect insurance, and the mysterious death of Stephen Smith, a gay man reportedly in a relationship with Buster Murdaugh.
This is such an incredibly convoluted story that it’s going to inevitably engage salacious reporters and readers. There’s almost no crime this dude didn’t get around to at some point (allegedly).
Also most likely killed the housekeeper.
And Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison. About what I expected, actually. I think the death sentence would be a tough sell.
…could be I picked up the wrong end of the stick somewhere along the way…but I had it in my head that they took the death penalty off the table in terms of what they were looking for judgement-wise?
…presumably precisely because it was a bigger hill to climb & his seemingly serial lying about an already bizarre fact pattern made it a counter-productive target that came with a bigger chance he’d skate on some technicality or other?
Rich white family doing murders and a fuckton of financial crimes.
Multigenerational rich white family. Also strong evidence of using connections to law enforcement to get away with previous crimes.
Really one of the rare situations where us peasants can take joy in some fancy rich person finally facing consequences for their actions.
Yup. “I’m rich, I can do anything.”
Looking ahead, if any of you feel like celebrating Easter in a very special way, might I recommend La Maison du Chocolat’s Easter Hen?
select size : dark chocolat or milk chocolat
lol
why yes i am easily amused
Hysterical reporting on a gender clinic turns out to be a con job:
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-03-02-right-wing-transphobia-panic/
Not before “concerned” contrarians jumped to assume they were true to confirm their prior beliefs, though.
How many litterboxes did they find in that clinic?
ETA: Oh, and those “concerned” contrarians included the state’s attorney general.
Because Missouri is a garbage pile of douchebags.
What’s interesting to me is the number of people there willing to talk to the press to call BS on it. I think it’s a sign of how bad the contrarian press coverage is that they seem willfully blind to the number of people who don’t fit their profiles, and the number who just don’t care.
The Atlantic and the NY Times want to feed the right wing panic, I think in part because they have a monolithic idea of middle America to reaffirm to themselves and their readers.
Fox News has a “soft ban” on Trump coverage.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/fox-news-soft-ban-trump-murdoch-sean-hannity
To be clear, it’s not that Trump has somehow become unpopular for the Fox base. It’s because Fox has plenty of choices of what kind of parnoid programming to throw at their base. They had the same choices in late 2020 and early 2021 too, but they made a deliberate choice to promote his attacks on democracy instead of choosing other programming.
Which is why all of their moaning in the Dominion suit is a joke. It shouldn’t be read as genuine fear of falling ratings, it was fearing they’d get caught in the fallout when Trump did what they wanted but couldn’t pull it off, and needing an excuse why they did it.
…so emptywheel’s eye for detail made a point about the timeline that had got lost in the mix of coverage (for me, anyway) to the effect that…effectively…it seems a lot like hair furore posted OAN stuff about his made up fraud & fox knowingly wheeled out powell to talk a bunch of what they knew to be shit more or less to court him…& the claims that strayed into dominion & defamation were aired by fox before they made it into any court filings…which they did…courtesy of powell…who never had president’s-lawyer paperwork & then got disavowed for being too far off piste…still got invited back onto fox even after that
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/02/28/release-the-kraken-fox-news-revolving-sidney-powell-conspiracy-theory-door/
…who was the prime mover in that is debatable…but the defamation part would seem not to be?
…so who was the big dog & who was the tail might be open to interpretation…but that the tail wagged furiously is not
…then there’s the whole thing where if you track these kinds of “strategy” back far enough it does seem to run into some familiar names with a documented history of improper associations with known russian operatives…not least where ukraine is concerned
…so…right in what was Mueller”s wheelhouse…unless you employ the billy barr interpretation by which “can not exonerate” is transfigured into “total exoneration” by the miracle of partisan hackery?
One of the obvious things is that Fox could have played up a nebulous “stolen election” drumbeat without getting into Dominion or anyone else specific at all.
They could have blamed it on Mexicans or socialists or public school teachers. Fox’s overall audience doesn’t care.
But as that piece points out, specific elements of Trump’s circle wanted this specific angle. And Murdoch was engaging with them at the earliest stages. It’s not a choice he had to make.
And I think this gets at the issue:
https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/163168471733342617
Murdoch is out for a lot more than just ratings, although that matters a lot to him. He’s also driven to control the GOP’s narrative, and to be a kingmaker.
He and his top people got into Dominion because of specific agendas and personnel that he wanted to promote that were far too technical and obscure for his general audience.
It’s funny, because unless I’m mistaken Dominion is essentially the latest iteration of Diebold, who really was in the middle of some questionable “black box voting” shit in the Bush-Kerry election. I remember at some point a Diebold exec declared they would “deliver” the election to Bush. I didn’t keep up with the developments to know if anything ever came of it.
My mail was delivered at 9:28pm last night.
I just…. That wasn’t necessary. I don’t understand why it couldn’t wait until daylight.
probably coz by daylight the next load of mail thats too much to be delivered in a reasonable amount of hours is already waiting
too much mail…not enough posties
Yeah that makes total sense. I just don’t think it’s safe for a postal carrier to be out on foot wearing a headlamp to deliver mail in the dark. Too easy to get hit by a car or trip and fall.
I don’t know if this has been covered but this is pretty funny!