DL Open Thread: Friday, April 28, 2023
Pence Spills The Beans. More than five hours before a Grand Jury. He’ll never be President, but he might just have saved democracy:
As the target of an intense pressure campaign in the final days of 2020 and early 2021 by Mr. Trump to convince him to play a critical role in blocking or delaying congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Pence is considered a key witness in the investigation.
Mr. Pence, who is expected to decide soon about whether to challenge Mr. Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands that he use his role as president of the Senate in the certification of the Electoral College results to derail the final step in affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.
Mr. Pence described in the book how Mr. Trump worked with Mr. Eastman to pressure him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He wrote that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump tried to bludgeon him again on a phone call.
“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”
Seems he did.
Fox Forced To Turn Over More Docs To Smartmatic. Just keeps getting better:
The judge had already agreed to a “broadening of discovery,” according to a ruling issued Tuesday, where he ordered Fox to make additional materials available, including information about the network’s 2020 ratings and about its internal fact-check team. But Smartmatic wanted more.
In a letter to the judge, Smartmatic lawyers said they “noticed obvious gaps” among the records Fox Corporation has already provided. They claim the right-wing outlet might be holding back material about the Murdochs.
The monster case pits Smartmatic against Fox News, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, and former host Lou Dobbs, who all promoted the baseless lie that Smartmatic rigged the 2020 election. An appeals court recently dropped Fox Corporation as a defendant, but Smartmatic refiled its lawsuit and is trying to re-add the parent company.
These figures falsely claimed Smartmatic was created to steal elections for former Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and that a global cabal of Democrats and socialists used Smartmatic software to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. (In truth, there wasn’t any widespread fraud in 2020, and Smartmatic’s machines were only used in one county that year.)
Just Keeps Getting Better: Fox Ratings Plummet:
Hundreds of thousands of Fox News viewers are reacting to Tucker Carlson’s firing by abandoning the network in his old time slot — at least temporarily.
Fox drew 1.33 million viewers for substitute host Brian Kilmeade in the 8 p.m. Eastern hour on Wednesday night, putting the network second to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in a competition Carlson used to dominate, the Nielsen company said.
That’s down 56% from the 3.05 million viewers Carlson reached last Wednesday, Nielsen said. For all of 2022, Carlson averaged 3.03 million viewers, second only to Fox’s “The Five” as the most popular program on cable television.
How Texas Proposes To ‘Solve’ Its Power Grid Problem. If you guessed that oil and gas companies would be the beneficiaries, you’d be correct:
Featuring nine pieces of legislation and a joint resolution, the package appears impressive at a glance; there are new rules governing energy costs, power-transmission incentives, and protection against grid attacks. State senators from both parties are happy to declare that the new laws—now awaiting final amendment and approval in the Texas House of Representatives—will beef up the state’s electricity markets and ensure reliability for consumers, a talking point echoed in media coverage.
Yet a keener analysis of the Senate bills reveals that they hardly do anything to keep the grid running—and, in their current form, would actually make Texans’ power woes even worse. Should they pass, the result wouldn’t just be an ill-equipped Texas grid, but an even weaker electrical system than the one that failed two years ago.
One of the headline bills from the package is SB 6, which establishes the Texas Energy Insurance Program—namely, a plan to construct new natural gas plants that would generate and hold up to 10,000 gigawatts of backup power when needed. These multibillion-dollar facilities would be weatherized to hold against severe storms and sit idle more than 97 percent of the time, as the Houston Chronicle noted. In addition, SB 6 would set up an insurance fund to keep older natural gas plants online so they can also provide 24/7 backup should the grid collapse again.
The other major piece of legislation is SB 7, which provides incentives for private companies to set up energy plants that can “come on within two hours and run for at least four hours”—which means even more natural gas. The key word is dispatchable energy, referring to energy sources that can be turned on and put into effect at all hours of the day. That language is meant to exclude renewables, since sunlight and wind currents are not available 24/7 in almost any climate. Of course, several providers have solved this oft-cited “intermittency” issue through various means: storage of renewable-generated energy in batteries, interconnected home-and-public-power transmission, compressed air. That doesn’t seem to matter to SB 7’s authors, who explicitly position their bill as an alternative to “low non-dispatchable power production.”
Man Shot And Killed Over Leaf Blower. Just another dog-bites-man story in armed America. However, couldn’t pass up the chance to share this musical masterpiece:
What do you want to talk about?
Thanks for saving Democracy, Pence & also fuck you!
Despite the camouflage the Texas power grid will yet crash and burn, see it as a new paint job on an old F150 that doesn’t run. Classic, is it not? As noted Fox lost viewers, and as predicted said viewers are probably eagerly awaiting the new Tucker and new reasons to hate, such is a part of America we could all live without. As for Fox and Smartmatic suspect there is indeed fun to be had, whining and Trump like cries of “I didn’t do anything wrong!” as well.
Maybe it’s time for Carney to give Gov. Abbott a call and let him know, “Hey, in Delaware, we’ve got these things called Bloom boxes…”
Kinda disappointed to read the NJ article about southbridge this morning. All we ever hear about is crumbling infrastructure and when it’s finally getting fixed, people complain about the inconvenience. Of all the issues that Haneef and co. could use to twist the arm of the city/state, this isn’t one. That work had to get done.
I also think it’s crummy that that somehow the Kalmar nyckel gets blamed-all of their facilities and activities are downstream of the bridge. That narrative seems fabricated, probably not out of malice, just lazy journalism
Yep, those unappreciative Southbridge residents. They don’t appreciate it when John Carney foists more environmentally-hazardous companies on the people who live there, they don’t appreciate it when Mayor Mike deep-sixes a development project supported by the community b/c the deep-pocketed denizens at the Riverfront complex don’t want to see it from their windows.
That community has been screwed forever. Why should the people who live there trust anything that state or city government would impose on them? I wouldn’t, and don’t.
All valid complaints. But if these projects didn’t happen, the headlines would read “combined sewer overflows continue to plague minority community” or “bridge fails, cutting off minority community for unknown length of time”
Everyone likes to talk about crumbling infrastructure but no one wants to take the medicine when it comes time to fix the problems. This wasn’t a vanity project and some projects are weather/funding dependent.
FYI the redevelopment didn’t get deep sixed, and it had nothing to do with what people at Christiana landing thought. It had everything to do with Cirillo Bros. committing a process error. It’s an open secret in the city that BPG gets first right of refusal on all the high-dollar downtown and riverfront work.
It’s just a nicer version of a mafia construction racket.
All 9 Supreme Court justices push back on oversight
Their commitment to self-policing would be a lot more believable if they prevailed on Clarence Thomas to resign.