Alex Jones trial award

The jury has ordered Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million to the parents of Jesse Hill as compensatory damages for the pain that he (and his mindless supporters) inflicted on them by his reckless claims that the Sandy Hook massacre in which Jesse died was a hoax and that the grieving parents were crisis actors.

The lawyers had asked for $150 million so this is a lot less but it could have been a much worse. The jury in Texas had to award something since Jones had already had a default judgment against him but they could have levied a nominal fine of just $1 if they had sided with him.

The trial is not over though. This award was just for compensation for the suffering of the parents and is meant to represent the costs of the real injury they suffered. The jury now has to decide on whether to award punitive damages against Jones. Punitive damages are meant as punishment for reckless and egregious behavior, in order to send a message and deter future such actions and hence it is hard to put a figure to it. Since it is meant to inflict pain, it depends on how much they think the person has in assets, since there is little point in a financial penalty that the defendant can easily afford.
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A dangerous strategy

Amy Davidson Sorkin warns that the Democratic party is pursuing a dangerous strategy in trying to help the most extreme Republican candidates in the primary races in the belief that they will be easier to defeat in the general elections.

The plan, such as it is, is that voters will recoil from these candidates and turn to the Democratic Party as a bastion of sanity. That’s a harder argument to make when playing games like this. Many Democrats recognize that, too. “It’s dishonorable, and it’s dangerous, and it’s just damn wrong,” Representative Dean Phillips, of Minnesota, told Politico. In the same piece, Representative Jason Crow, of Colorado, called the ploy “very dangerous” and “substantively risky.” The implied risk is that the extreme candidate could actually win.
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Alex Jones’s lies exposed in court as one trial ends

We know that Alex Jones lies and lies brazenly. In a surprising development, his lies have now been exposed in court during the trial to determine how much damages Alex Jones should pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Heslin who was murdered at Sandy Hook, the parents’s lawyer Mark Bankston dramatically revealed a lie that Jones has made. It was exposed because Jones’s lawyers had inadvertently sent copies of all the text messages on Jones’s phone to Bankston.

In a remarkable moment, Bankston disclosed to Jones and the court that he had recently acquired evidence proving Jones had lied when he claimed during the discovery process that he had never texted about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Bankston said that Jones’ attorney had, in an apparent mishap, sent him two years of cell phone records that included every text message Jones had sent.

The cell phone records, Bankston said, showed that Jones had in fact texted about the Sandy Hook shooting.

“That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook,” Bankston said.

Bankston showed Jones a text message exchange he had about Sandy Hook. But Jones testified that he had “never seen these text messages.”

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Saying the quiet part about unemployment out loud

One of the bright spots in the current economy has been the low unemployment rate and the increase in wages. It is an open secret that corporations likes to have high unemployment because it makes workers powerless and thus can be forced to accept lower wages and less likely to ask for better working conditions or (horror of horrors) form unions, since they can be scared by the prospect of getting fired. But businesses rarely say that out loud because it looks bad to say that you want to see more people out of work. So they usually find ways of directly avoiding doing so and do not really need to since business owners are aware of this open secret. But a recent report from Bank of America actually said that it hopes for higher unemployment in the future.

A BANK OF AMERICA executive stated that “we hope” working Americans will lose leverage in the labor market in a recent private memo obtained by The Intercept. Making predictions for clients about the U.S. economy over the next several years, the memo also noted that changes in the percentage of Americans seeking jobs “should help push up the unemployment rate.”

The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”

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Really? Australians still take an oath of allegiance to the queen?

Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous person who was elected to the Australian senate as a member of the Green party, added the word ‘colonizing’ before the words ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ while taking the oath of office. The presiding officer stopped her and said that she should only read the words on the card, which she then did, while making clear with her intonation and facial expressions that she found it offensive.


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A MAGA movement I can get behind

That is the Mothers Against Greg Abbott movement that is fighting against the reactionary Texas governor and the state’s highly restrictive abortion laws.

Governor Abbott will face Beto O’Rourke in November in Texas’s gubernatorial election. Axios reported that although Abbott has more funding overall, O’Rourke has raised more campaign money than the incumbent since February, reflecting the ever-tightening race. In December, only 37% of voters said they supported O’Rourke, while this month, 43% said they supported him.

Did Trump really want Pence, Pelosi and other members of Congress murdered?

Thanks to the congressional hearings, we know that when the mob on January 6th shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” and looked for Nancy Pelosi to kill her and ran through the halls of the Capitol seeking to find them and others whom they felt were preventing Trump from getting a second term in office, Trump was fully aware of the mob’s intentions because he was watching those three hours from 1:10 pm to 4:17 pm unfold on the TV in his private dining room. Not only did he not lift a finger to stop the mob, he egged them on, sending out this tweet at 2:24 pm.


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Samantha Bee’s show canceled

I have frequently linked to clips from her show Full Frontal because they were topical, funny, hard-hitting, and biting. So I was saddened to learn that after seven seasons, it will not be renewed this fall.

Over the course of seven seasons, Bee’s “Full Frontal” brought an aggressive and saucy voice to TV’s late-night arena, and one of the few programs led by a female point-of-view. Bee captured attention with outrageous humor and monologues that pushed the usually genial cable network to embrace hefty amounts of profanity and tackle political issues that are often polarizing.
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“We do a show to please ourselves,” Bee told Variety during an interview in 2016. “This gives us an opportunity to say the things we want in the exact way we want to say them.” In the process, her viewers get a few laughs, but also can exorcise their frustrations with modern politics and culture.
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The end of “Full Frontal” comes as Warner Bros. Discovery has been cutting back on its content spend for big cable networks like TBS and TNT. To be sure, the outlets continue to feature movies and have added more nights of sports, thanks to a recent rights deal struck between Warner Bros. Discovery and the NHL. But TBS has been cutting back on scripted series, with shows such as “Chad” and “The Last O.G.” scrapped in recent weeks. Brett Weitz, general manager of TBS, TNT and TruTV, left the company in May after the cable networks were consolidated under the aegis of Warner Bros. Discovery executive Kathleen Finch. Weitz had been a strong backer of “Full Frontal.”

It seems like scripted shows are giving way to cheaper alternatives like sports and reality TV.

Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and Conan O’Brien’s show were two very good comedy programs that also are no more.

“Yesterday is a hard word for me”: Committee is now trolling Trump

It is becoming obvious that the televised congressional hearings are infuriating Trump. After each session, he issues long rants about them essentially repeating the same things, that it is a partisan witch hunt aimed at him, and that he really did win the election. The problem for Trump is that he is a narcissistic TV addict and so he cannot resist watching a show in which he is the main character, however unflattering it is. So he essentially rage-watches.

It is clear that the members of the committee have noticed this and the last prime time hearing on Thursday, in addition to focusing on Trump’s culpability in inciting the riot and his deliberate and inexcusable passivity while it was going on, also took the opportunity to needle him with outtakes of the video statements Trump put out on January 6th (after doing nothing for more than three hours and instead just watching the riot unfold on the TV in his private dining room) and on the following day, both of which reveal his deep reluctance to condemn the violence of his supporters.

His White House advisors were apprehensive about Trump going on TV and ad libbing because they feared that he would say further inflammatory things and so they prepared a script for him to read. But he ignored it and ad libbed anyway and you can see the result below, where he called the rioters “very special” and that “we love you'”. Who did he mean by ‘we’ anyway?
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