She loved her son and wouldn’t put up with this kind of nonsense

The suit brought by Dominion Voting against Fox News has concluded. This is the suit the Dominion voting machine company brought against the media giant asking for $1.6 billion for lying about the 2020 election and accusing Dominion of programming its machines to flip votes. That, of course, hurt Dominion’s reputation and business. Thus the suit. On March 31, three weeks ago, after the parties had been going at this for a while and after Dominion released lots of emails showing Fox management knew what was going on-air was a lie, Judge Eric Davis gave a ruling. KeithDB of the Daily Kos community reported the ruling said Fox News had lied and that Dominion had been defamed by those lies. Going into the trial Fox cannot dispute those lies and cannot dispute the defamation. Fox cannot claim it is just reporting news about a famous person. That means the court comes down to one thing: was that defamation actual malice. There is a standard definition of malice that must be met. And meeting that definition looked likely. And on Wednesday, April 19, Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Dominion and Fox News settled, avoiding the trial. That came after the start of the trial was delayed, so all the jury heard was a thank you from the judge. The settlement is that Fox News will pay $787 million, just under half of what Dominion wanted. And Fox’s lawyers issued a statement saying “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” That is definitely a non-apology. But Fox on-air hosts don’t (and won’t) have to say anything other than the lawsuit is over. They will hear continued claims about fraud in the 2020 election, even if Dominion isn’t named. That means Fox – and Tucker Carlson – can claim they won the suit. And go back to their usual lies. As for that $787 million – that’s all of 5% of Fox News revenue for 2022. This trial of Dominion against Fox News was the best shot of reining them in that will come in a long while. We – those who treasure democracy – lost a chance. Perhaps Smartmatic’s similar case will go better. And it gets worse. Sumner reported that Fox is looking to us to pay its bill. Many TV stations are bundled together and a viewer gets access to all the channels in the bundle. That means people who don’t watch, perhaps are even disgusted by, Fox News pay for Fox News. And Fox need only go to the cable services and when the contract is up for renewal demand a higher fee. This subscription bundling is why Fox News can be quite profitable without airing commercials. Fox News can also declare the settlement is a legal expense ordinary and necessary for doing business – and get a hefty tax break. Wrote Sumner:

No apology. No admission of guilt. Bills covered by people who don’t watch Fox. Massive tax break. Yeah. That’ll teach ‘em. Fox News will never do that again.

Yeah, I’m disgusted by it all. I had written that Fox News has been trying to make a story of a Bud Lite commercial featuring a transgender person. Walter Einenkel of Kos explains another part of their coverage – Fox News is not covering the recent scandal around Justice Clarence Thomas. Hunter of Kos reported that Thomas was also given money by billionaire Harlan Crow in the form of Crow buying property from Thomas. Wrote Hunter:

If you're familiar with any of Thomas' work on actual Supreme Court cases, that's not terribly surprising. When it comes to omitting inconvenient details and regularly inventing new theories to explain why most of the other details never mattered to begin with, Thomas' opinions are masterpieces. Of course Thomas doesn't think "a billionaire Republican activist-donor who sponsors my vacation lifestyle purchased my mom's house so that he can build a museum honoring my greatness" would rise to the level of reportable income. It falls in the narrow disclosure gap outlined by subsection I Don't Have To, paragraph Bite Me. CNN now has some news updates on the land-deal story, and none of it is any better for Thomas than it was before. Thomas now says he intends to amend his financial disclosures, yet again, to disclose the 2014 sale of his mother's house to Crow. According to a "source close to Thomas," Thomas believed the sale wasn't required to be disclosed because he allegedly "lost money" in the transaction. This is absolute hokum, and Thomas is always a real hard-ass when deciding cases in which a defendant was confused about the rules and got wrecked by our legal systems because of it. He despises the idea that you're allowed a second chance if your lawyer accidentally flubs your case due to an egregious oversight. He despises the idea that you should get a chance to correct the record. When it comes to himself, he's still regularly re-re-updating disclosure forms filed during the Obama administration. To repeat: All of this is ridiculous. Absurd.

The Daily Show was hosted by its own correspondent Jordan Klepper. He had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a guest and she put it simply: Supreme Court justice should not be receiving money from anyone. That’s why we pay salaries to public servants. Want to live lavishly? Resign. Biden has had a pretty good run getting his nominees for federal courts approved. He’s kept up the pace, nominating a diverse pool of progressive people. His approvals are ahead of what the nasty guy did at the corresponding point in his term. Then Dianne Feinstein, who is 89, possibly suffering from dementia, and has already announced her retirement, had a bad case of shingles. She left Capitol Hill to recuperate and that plus complications has kept her away for about six weeks. Without her the Democrats don’t have a majority on the Judiciary Committee. Judicial confirmations have stopped. Feinstein recognized the problem and asked Schumer to replace her, at least temporarily. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Republicans said nope. Several have made statements saying Republicans should not assist in packing the courts with “activist” judges. Never mind that Senate committee assignments have never been subject to partisan fights. There are ways, cumbersome ways, to get around the deadlocked Judiciary Committee. One of those ways is to bust the filibuster – and we know which Democrats blocked that from happening last time. McCarter also posted that this stunt has Moscow Mitch’s fingerprints – and words – all over it. Mitch is newly back to the Senate after recovering from a concussion resulting from a fall. McCarter wrote:

This, again, from the man who engineered a court packed with Trump nominees the American Bar Association deemed unqualified, with right-wing extremist nutjobs like District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who most recently declared himself more of an expert on drug safety than the Food and Drug Administration. ... Setting aside Feinstein’s wishes represents a new low from McConnell. This exact situation is unprecedented, at least in modern Senate history, but this is the first time one conference has absolutely denied the opposing party a committee seat. This is just basic stuff about how the body works, determined by the organizing resolution at the beginning of the Senate. Leadership of both parties divides up how many seats on each committee the majority and minority get, and the composition of those memberships is decided by each party conference. Period. Until now. McConnell has now destroyed all of the most basic norms and traditions of the Senate, leaving Democrats completely flat-footed, again.

I heard Mitch’s words while in my car. I slammed the off switch, muttering that man is vile. Because of the Thomas scandal Chief Justice has been invited to testify before the Judiciary Committee to talk about ethics in general and Thomas specifically. And this is another way in which Mitch is strangling the committee – without Feinstien and the majority she adds, the committee isn’t able to issue subpoenas – such as for Thomas’ financial records. The biggest scandal to hit the court in decades and Mitch has hobbled the committee that should investigate it. John Darkow of the Columbia Missourian tweeted a cartoon of two janitors cleaning the Supreme Court hearing chamber. One of the nine chairs has been replaced by a throne. One janitor says, “That’s Justice Thomas’ chair – Harlan Crow bought it for him.” Sister sent me a link to a story by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker. It is a history of Jeanne Manford and her son Morty. I had heard parts of the story and glad I could learn the rest of it. Jeanne caught attention when she walked in the 1972 Christopher Street Liberation Day March in NYC (the predecessor of the Pride Parade). She held a sign “I’m proud of my gay son” and Morty walked beside her. That was a phenomenal statement for the time. The crowd reaction included gay men coming up to her asking, “Could you talk to my parents?” By the end of the march she and Morty had come up with a plan to create what became PFLAG – Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Its purpose was and still is for people to come together to talk about their LGBTQ children and friends and learn how to be supportive both in the family and in the political scene. It grew into a national organization with international chapters. Morty died of AIDS. Jeanne died in 2013 at age 92...

The next month, Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal for her work on behalf of L.G.B.T.Q. people and their families. In his remarks, he summarized, in the plainest possible terms, the reason she stood up against bigotry on behalf of her son: “She loved him and wouldn’t put up with this kind of nonsense.”

She was a hero and founding mother in the LGBTQ rights movement. Her national organization has shifted towards trans issues and is doing all it can to counter the growing tide of anti-trans bills. PFLAG’s current president sums up their purpose:

We love all of our children, and we’re not going to leave any of them behind.

Thank you Morty, Thank you Jeanne.