…apologies to anyone who got their hopes up about yesterday…in deference to whom I figured I’d offer the minimal courtesy of not making this the header image, although having found it in the image library I’m afraid I won’t be sparing you the sight of it entirely

…mostly on account of if I tried to find a real one with a fittingly fatuous expression I’d still be sifting through the being-swamped-for-choice part & I’m out of practice with these as it is…still the top line

British PM Boris Johnson narrowly survives vote that threatened to oust him from power

…is arguably misleading…but even the US coverage doesn’t waste any time getting past the “this is fine” bit & onto acknowledging the flames

Johnson won by 211 votes to 148 in a high-drama secret ballot in Parliament that threatened to oust him from power. That’s a majority of just 63, dividing his party 59 percent to 41 percent — a far bigger mutiny than many pundits had expected.

Crucially for some, it’s also a bigger revolt than the one Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, suffered in her own confidence vote in 2019. Although she limped on wounded, she was gone within six months.

The question that will dominate the halls of Westminster is how long Johnson, 57, can last now that almost half of his own parliamentary party has voted to kick him out.

Johnson tried to portray his survival as “a very good result for politics and the country.” He said in a broadcast interview that it was an “opportunity to put behind us all the stuff that the media have wanted us to focus on for quite a long time.”

Evidence suggests the crisis isn’t just a media obsession, however.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/british-prime-minister-boris-johnson-wins-confidence-vote

…so obviously the UK papers are…all over it…or it’s all over them…either way, despite all the “that’s all over” talk coming out of no. 10…it’s…not over by the looks of it

‘Out in a year’: what the papers say about Tory vote on Boris Johnson [GUardian]

…don’t know that it qualifies for the title of a pyrrhic victory…not when there’s things like brexit to compare it to…but when your pitch boils down to “yes, yes – I know I’m rubbish at this but have you seen the state of the the rest of them?” to say things aren’t looking good would be a positively british degree of understatement

“He actually took the call just as he was heading off to the pageant so he didn’t have the time to communicate it to even his closest advisers until after it was done. He sat there smiling at the performances for a couple of hours, wondering what to do and then he rang a few of us to go round last night and get on with it,” one of his closest associates said.

Arriving for the jubilee service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey he was booed by crowds of flag-waving royalists. “He will have absolutely hated that but it’s what he needed to hear,” said one of his Tory critics.

The Mail on Sunday reported that Johnson was previously so tetchy about being booed in an east London restaurant where his son, Theo, worked that he “flicked his finger” in a rude gesture at the public hecklers. Those who know Johnson well say he cannot bear the idea of being disliked, and has been reluctant to believe the polls and focus groups showing his standing with the public has plummeted.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/07/glum-and-distracted-boris-johnson-tries-to-bounce-back-from-boos

…so naturally there are overstatements of support & encouragement for the poor beleaguered (…& according to some of those headlines, “wounded”) presently-still-the-prime-minister…who…with a straight face & apparently no sense of irony…vowed to “bash on”…as ever, let’s take a moment to be grateful that john crace is around to run it down along with at least a bit of the blood pressure

As the other MPs made their way to various corners of Westminster, Johnson’s top spinner came to deliver the official verdict. An architect of chaos very much in the image of his master. It had been a complete triumph, he said. The MPs had fallen down to worship in front of their leader. Not that they had any choice because there was no one worth having as leader instead.

This had been serious Boris, the spinner said. “There had been a lot of detailed policy stuff in there.” Though when pressed, he couldn’t remember any of it. Details. Details. There would also be tax cuts. But he hadn’t a clue what. More details. Details. He ended by saying that Boris really wasn’t sorry for anything. Least of all his lies. And that the vote was pretty much a waste of everyone’s time. A sociopath to the last.

“Who here doesn’t get pissed? Who here doesn’t like a glass of wine to decompress?” I put my hand up but was ignored. Boris would go to all the parties again if he had the choice. It was totally tone deaf. No recognition of breaking the law. Contrite Boris was last week’s Boris. It was almost as if he had nothing but contempt for his MPs and was goading them to vote against him. An elaborate game of dare.
[…]
A rather troubled looking Convict emerged shortly after 7pm when the queue had died down. Perhaps it’s finally dawned on him that his whole premiership has long since stopped being a joke. That his options are rapidly running out. That the populist leader is no longer popular and has nothing left to offer anyone. That he has even lost the support of a large number of his most myopic constituency. His MPs. He probably voted twice – once for and once against – just for old times’ sake.

At 9pm on the dot, Brady announced the result. 211 for, 148 against. As expected The Convict had won the vote but lost the leadership. Worse even than the Maybot back in 2018. Johnson would say he was going to hang on – he’s a bad loser – but there was no coming back from this. It may be weeks, it may be months but Boris is toast. And the Tories would spend the time fighting each other to the death. While the country is on its knees. At a standstill. What a legacy. Johnson must be so proud.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/06/day-of-pleading-and-threats-ends-with-boris-johnson-in-post-just-about

…but you’d be amazed the stuff people just plain quit seeming to remember

It appears the House’s Jan. 6 committee has some work to do with the American public as it begins a new round of public hearings this week on its findings.

Just 45 percent of Americans say Donald Trump is “solely” or “mainly” responsible for the rioters who overtook the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack, versus a combined 55 percent who say the former president is only somewhat responsible or not really responsible, according to results from the latest NBC News poll.

The erosion in those holding Trump responsible for the attack has come across the board — among Democrats (who declined from 91 percent responsible in Jan. 2021 to 87 percent now), Republicans (11 percent to 9 percent) and independents (44 percent to 41 percent).

The takeaway from our poll: Time has been on Trump’s side. The question is whether the upcoming hearings can return public opinion to where it was in early 2021.
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/fewer-americans-now-say-trump-responsible-jan-6-nbc-news-poll-finds

…that public opinion…fickle bastard that it may be…I’m still thinking the part that’s disappointingly consistent is a sort of fun-house mirror reflection of twin brands of lack of faith in the institutions that we’d all be happier to consider both immune to the levels of implausible-in-the-absence-of-criminality apparent corruption and immune to hijacking…rather than a go to method for the latter…which paradoxically manages to pit people disillusioned by the failure of their government and politicians to confront (much less act upon) the glaring threats to their wellbeing that ought to preoccupy all of us…against people who overtly seek to enshrine themselves as a dictatorial minority ruling in a suspiciously feudal manner over something their obsession with “the founders” ought to have impressed upon them is nominally something called a republic…so, I guess brace yourselves because as of thursday the circus is very much coming to town

Almost a year after the formation of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers are set to take their case public.

On Thursday night, Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will launch a series of televised hearings featuring a combination of live witnesses, pretaped interviews with figures that include Trump family members and previously unseen video footage.

The hearings mark the culmination of an inquiry that has involved more than 1,000 interviews and reviews of more than 125,000 records. Taken together, the work represents the most comprehensive record yet of the deadly assault, and which panel members have come to believe stands out as only the most visible evidence of a broader plot to undermine American democracy — one that emanated from the White House.

…& I know, I know…flawed as it undoubtedly was there was still more than enough to be found in that much heralded mueller report to demonstrate that even before being recast as “exoneration” the foregone conclusion of at least one of those record twin impeachments ought to have gone the other way…& you could perhaps explain part of that phenomenon on the grounds that if even the people with a vote in those proceedings betray no sign of having been up for that much reading it might very well follow that nor will the people who voted them there…so maybe putting the jan 6th stuff on tv will be like those heineken ads

[…full disclosure…I kinda wanted the one that starts with a door marked “school of street credibility” on account of the common language angle…but I couldn’t find a link that wanted to embed]

But the end result of the committee’s efforts remains an open question. Public opinions about Jan. 6 and about former president Donald Trump have long since hardened into competing blocs, making it difficult to break through, even with prime-time programming. The committee also has been bedeviled by a lack of cooperation from some Republicans — including some of those closest to Trump — leaving potential gaps in the evidence and an apparent deficit of high-profile figures willing to take the witness stand.

Legally, meanwhile, the investigation may have limited direct consequence: Although the committee can refer cases for prosecution, it is the Justice Department that will ultimately decide whether to file any charges.

Still, a criminal referral by Congress of a former U.S. president would be an extraordinary step. And whether it is taken or not, the hearings will represent a historic moment, one in which the committee unveils evidence of what it has described in court filings as “a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
[…]
The first hearing is likely to provide the American public with an opening argument and overview of the events on the day rioters assaulted the Capitol, as well as the weeks that preceded it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/04/jan-6-committee-set-make-its-case-public-with-prime-time-hearing/

…&…you know…I get it…you have to set out a case…& your most formidable opponent may actually be people’s preference for not paying attention…but you’d be forgiven for thinking that when there’s everything from the thoroughly modern live-streamed first-hand video of that debacle unfolding by the truckload…& there’s even stuff like a blend between a documentary & a supercut of the stuff available on netflix…anyone capable of claiming it wasn’t what it looked like is…well…”on one”

“People must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don’t defend it,” Cheney (R-Wyo.) said on “CBS Sunday Morning.” She was referring to the upcoming hearings from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The effort by former president Donald Trump and his allies to undermine the 2020 election, she said, was “an ongoing threat” that she found “chilling.”

Cheney was articulating a position we’ve heard often since the 2020 election: that there exists a threat to American democracy from Trump’s insistences about the election having been tainted by fraud or otherwise “rigged” against him. That there are people willing to set aside the results of elections in favor of their preferred outcomes who are actively working to make doing so easier. It is the goal of the committee Cheney vice-chairs to make that eminently defensible position better understood.

But the fight is almost certainly already lost. Over the past year, partisan views of the risk to American democracy have not moved, while support for Cheney’s position from members of her party has softened. In the debate over what poses the biggest threat to American democracy — rampant fraud of the sort theorized for self-serving reasons by Trump or attempts to undercut the election process — Republicans are far more concerned about the former.

And in fact, they are more likely to express concern about democracy in general as a result. In other words, not only has Trump’s argument carried the day with his party, his false fraud claims have managed to spark more concern about democracy than has the months-long examination of the very real attempt to steal the 2020 election on his behalf.
[…]
Polling from YouGov found that the percentage of Republicans who viewed the attack at the Capitol as a threat to democracy fell from 24 percent in 2021 to 18 percent this year. Importantly, Republicans were twice as likely to go from saying in 2021 that it was a threat to saying this year that it wasn’t than they were to have moved from saying it wasn’t a threat last year to saying it was this year. Ten percent of respondents moved from threat to non-threat; only 5 percent moved from non-threat to threat — despite everything we’ve learned and despite the investigations by the House committee.

…& of course the broken clock can be confusing from time to time

It cannot be stated enough that Trump’s claims about fraud are entirely baseless and that his vaguer arguments about the election having been stacked against him are little better. But he has been effective at creating a demand economy for claims about how he lost a second term through deviousness, and allies have rushed to meet that demand.

By the beginning of this year, that meant that Americans overall told CNN and its pollsters from SSRS that they had only a little confidence in elections to reflect the will of the people. This question can be interpreted in a lot of ways; those who believe electoral systems are exclusionary for certain voting groups, for example, might agree that elections don’t reflect the will of the people. But that nearly three-quarters of Republicans held that view suggests that much of the concern stems from accusations about election tampering.
[…]
For the first anniversary of the attack, Quinnipiac asked how Americans viewed the investigation itself. Again, independents were about as likely to say that the events at the Capitol should never be forgotten as they were to say it was “time to move on” from the subject.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/06/right-sees-democracy-more-risk-thanks-largely-fraud-claims/

…I guess what you can stomach depends on the diet you’re used to

Republican talking points heading into the J6 hearings are remarkably consistent. pic.twitter.com/F56oNbEVIm

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 6, 2022

…but here’s hoping the facts on the ground are clear enough

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the former longtime chairman of the extremist group Proud Boys, was indicted on a new federal charge of seditious conspiracy with four top lieutenants on Monday. The charges expand the Justice Department’s allegations of organized plotting to oppose through violence the certification of President Biden’s election victory, culminating in the attack on the Capitol by a mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
[…]
A 10-count superseding indictment returned Monday morning charges Tarrio, Pezzola and three other existing defendants — Ethan Nordean of Washington state, Joe Biggs of Florida and Zachary Rehl of Pennsylvania — with “opposing the lawful transfer of presidential power by force,” eventually mustering and coordinating the movements of as many as 300 people around the Capitol that day. The defendants are accused of fomenting and spearheading a riot that stormed the Capitol, eventually forcing the evacuation of Congress as it met to confirm the 2020 election results.

Federal prosecutors previously leveled the historically rare charge of seditious conspiracy for the first time in the Jan. 6 attack against Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the extremist group Oath Keepers, and 10 associates. Since filing the charges in January, a year after the violence, two of the other defendants, Joshua James of Alabama and Brian Ulrich of Georgia, and one other Oath Keeper member, William Todd Wilson of North Carolina, have pleaded guilty to the charge and are cooperating with the Justice Department.
[…]
The charges show prosecutors pulling together a wider picture of organization within extremist groups that shared overlapping if not common goals. The investigations have exposed hints of coordination among groups, even as the FBI and Justice Department are expanding their investigations into the political orbit of former president Donald Trump. The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack is expected to shine a spotlight on such connections in public hearings starting Thursday.
[…]
Meanwhile, multiple Oath Keepers members provided security for Trump confidant Roger Stone on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, court records show, while at previous pro-Trump rallies he surrounded himself with Proud Boys, including Tarrio, who has served as an aide to Stone.

In the Oath Keepers case, a defendant this spring made public the transcript of a Nov. 9, 2020, videoconference call of the Oath Keepers, in which Rhodes has Sorelle debrief members on “multiple pods working” to challenge Biden’s election victory. Sorelle said those in the pods included the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, QAnon supporters and the legal team of Rudy Giuliani.
[…]
On Jan. 3, an unidentified “Person 3” wrote on an encrypted Proud Boys leadership chat that the group should “plan the operations based around the front entrance to the Capitol building,” according to the indictment. The following day, it alleged, Tarrio posted a voice message to a “Ministry of Self Defense” leaders group, stating, “I didn’t hear this voice note until now, you want to storm the Capitol.” After the Capitol was breached, Tarrio wrote in a Telegram group chat, “We did this,” prosecutors said.

That night, in a new detail alleged in the 32-page indictment, a fellow Proud Boys member identified as “Person 1” messaged Tarrio exulting with a profanity, “1776.” Tarrio, according to the charging document, then replied “The Winter Palace,” a reference to a Proud Boys planning document that had a section called “Storm the Winter Palace,” referring to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the former imperial palace in St. Petersburg that was raided by Bolsheviks, CNN first reported.

Someone identified in the indictment as “Person 1” also suggested to Tarrio that the election result could be invalidated if lawmakers failed to vote by midnight, a seeming attempt to interpret the Electoral Counting Act in a way to deny Biden’s victory that echoed the effort by Trump’s own lawyers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/06/tarrio-proud-boys-seditious-conpiracy/

…this shit hasn’t even started yet & it’s already exhausting just trying to keep up with the mental gymnastics required to get you to somehow think that 1776, the actual here-comes-communism russian revolution, overturning elections & these chucklefucks somehow belong close enough together to be part of single train of thought…supposedly one that will stay on the tracks…about “saving democracy”…which would I guess bring us back to that header image…& how for some people that does seem to be the goal

It’s always tempting to share news that comes across our social media feeds when it not only seems outrageous but also confirms our biases, fears or suspicions.
[…]
Increasingly, “articles” that look like news may be something entirely different — false or misleading information grounded not in evidence but in partisan politics, produced not by reporters for a local newspaper but by inexperienced writers who are paid, in essence, to spread propaganda.

Last week provided a case in point when what looked like a legitimate news story went viral.

Published in the “West Cook News,” the story purported to reveal that a suburban Chicago school would soon be giving students different grades depending on their race.[…]

The school issued an unequivocal statement denying the story. While school board members have considered all sorts of research about grading practices — the bogus story relied on out-of-context material presented in a meeting for discussion — the school “does not, nor has it ever had a plan to, grade any students differently based on race.” Georgetown professor Donald Moynihan debunked the story point by point: “The piece has failed the most basic journalistic standard: it has not provided evidence either for the sensationalistic headline or its core claims.”
[…]
This single incident was bad enough; what’s worse is what it shows us about our poisoned news environment. While fact-based, accountable local newspapers are struggling to survive — many of them facing budget cuts or closure — what’s known as “pink slime” sites are sneakily trying to fill the void. They traffic in falsehood and exaggeration, paid for by political groups, especially on the right.

“These sites are insidious,” said Alan Miller, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project, the D.C.-based nonprofit organization that works to make students and the public smarter news consumers and better citizens.

Named after a meat-processing byproduct used as filler — in other words, it looks like meat but isn’t — pink slime news sites are often funded through secret and politically motivated “dark money” contributions. And they are growing fast. In 2020, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School identified at least 1,200 such sites.

With names such as the Des Moines Sun and Illinois Valley Times, they leverage the trust that people have for local newspapers, built up over many decades, to boost their own dubious credibility. Their content is “rooted in deception, eschewing hallmarks of news reporting like fairness and transparency,” according to a New York Times investigation that referred to them as “Pay-for-Play” outlets. Most of them, for example, don’t disclose the funding they get from advocacy groups. Davey Alba, one of the reporters who co-wrote the Times investigation, noted that the “West Cook News” is part of a network of local sites run by Republican operatives.

Meanwhile, of course, local newspapers are shrinking or dying. Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers were closed, as I detailed in my book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” And although many legitimate and admirable news sites have sprung up to help fill the gap, it isn’t always easy for news consumers to know the difference.
[…]
The News Literacy Project has managed to reach tens of thousands of educators and, through them, potentially millions of students. Because older people are most likely to share false information, according to research published in 2019 in the journal Science Advances, the News Literacy Project is working with an affiliate of AARP and hopes to expand the partnership.

There’s really only one solution, after all: skeptical awareness.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/06/05/pink-slime-west-cook-news-school-race-grading/

…& while it may be hard when people start talking about a “dead cat bounce” not to remember what is popularly cited as what “killed the cat”…a healthy dose of curiosity might not go amiss

I have always wanted to learn more, whether it’s about the history of the Xia dynasty or about what drives homelessness in the city I call home. When I was a kid, after years of feeling alone in my hunger for information, the academic team was the first time I could make that knowledge useful.

I’ve come to think of that impulse to know as academic team energy. More than just a drive to understand things better, it is also the joy of knowing, of taking a fact from a page in a book and putting it in my brain, where I will keep it forever.

But if you’ve spent a lot of time online or tried to talk about politics with someone you’ve just met, you probably have witnessed a different kind of relationship to knowledge. I call it debate team energy, the irritating cousin of academic team energy, in which the point of the discussion isn’t a craving for information but a lust for victory. It’s an irrepressible need to achieve some sort of win in a conversation with someone who will inevitably regret participating in it.
[…]
Debate team energy is abundant in our culture. It fuels the way that some media outlets cover politics; everything is up for debate. It floods basically any conversation people attempt to have on Twitter. And it is at play in so many of our discussions these days, as we regard those with opposing views as losers and jerks.
[…]
But more important, debate team energy separates us from the importance of the subject matter being debated, even if it’s the lives and experiences of real people.
When Every Conversation Becomes a Game, We All Lose [NYT]

…&…well…I guess one man’s sophistry is another’s propaganda…or something…but I’d better up my game between now & thursday because I’m out of time & I feel like I barely began…let alone got to the rest of what might be considered the events of the day?