REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments

The Ledes

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

New York Times: “The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died on July 1. He was 90.” ~~~

~~~ For another sort of obituary, see Akhilleus' commentary near the end of yesterday's thread.

The Wires

Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

Link Code: <a href="URL">text</a>

OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts.

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

Page Links

Tuesday

Jun202023

Garland's Big Lie

On January 5, 2022, the eve of the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a “solemn speech,” according to a contemporaneous Guardian report, in which he pledged to hold responsible all those who attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results: “'The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,' Garland said in his address, delivered from the justice department’s Great Hall in Washington. 'We will follow the facts wherever they lead.'...

“Garland did not mention [Donald] Trump by name, and in keeping with the justice department’s longstanding rule not to comment on ongoing investigations, he did not detail any possible leads the department was pursuing related to the former US president, his family or his allies. But the carefully crafted speech seemed designed to address concerns about the focus of the investigation.... 'There cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless,' he added.”

However, if yesterday's Washington Post report is substantially correct, then Garland was lying in January 2022. Or at least in that “carefully-crafted speech,” he was purposely misleading listeners, suggesting that the Department of Justice was pursuing “the powerful” people behind the coup attempt. According to the Post, “'A decision was made early on to focus DOJ resources on the riot,' said one former Justice Department official.... 'The notion of opening up on Trump and high-level political operatives was seen as fraught with peril. When [Deputy Attorney General] Lisa [Monaco] and Garland came on board, they were fully onboard with that approach.' Some prosecutors even had the impression that Trump had become a taboo topic at Main Justice.... Garland, Monaco and [FBI Director Christopher] Wray ... remained committed to [a 'going up the ladder' approach] even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.”

The Post reports that it was not until April 2022, months after Garland's misleading January 2022 speech and 15 months after the insurrection, that “Wray signed off on the authorization opening a criminal investigation into the fake electors plot. Still, the FBI was tentative: Internally, some of the ex-president’s advisers and his reelection campaign were identified as the focus of the bureau’s probe, but not Trump.” And that sign-off came only after federal judge David O. Carter ruled in March 2022 that “Trump 'more likely than not' committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes.” “More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability.… If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself,” Carter wrote in his opinion.

And it was not until November 2022, after Trump announced he would seek the presidency* again, that Garland got around to appointing a special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to oversee the case.

If you believe the attorney general should tell the public the truth, then you were mighty irritated when then-attorney general Bill Barr lied about the contents of the Mueller report weeks before Barr allowed the report itself to be released to the public. How is it any better for the current attorney general to craftily imply the Justice Department is investigating “the powerful” when DOJ and the FBI were doing no such thing? To err is human; to lie about erring is unconscionable.

Comments Off

Permalink

Email Article

Reader Comments (2)

Yes.

June 20, 2023 |

Jeanne

Here's a bit of an exchange between PBS's Geoff Bennett and WP reporter Aaron Davis:

Geoff Bennett:

In this piece reported by you and Carol Leonnig, you quote a former Justice official, who says of the current DOJ: "You can work so hard not to be a partisan that you're failing to do your job."

How widely held a view was that within the DOJ, that the Garland DOJ was, in many ways, overcorrecting for the perceived ethical failures of the Barr DOJ?

Aaron Davis:

There was a huge culture shift.

In Garland's own words, this was to try to get back to regular order. Under Bill Barr, there were many times that the attorney general said, this is a valid investigation, this is not a valid investigation. The attorney general, Garland, wanted to come in and say, I'm not going to make those decisions. These should bubble up to me from the bottom through evidence.

The problem was, there was such a culture that had been effected by — under the previous administration, where it was hard to go up the chain. There wasn't the mechanism to go up and try to make these cases. And very early on, even before Garland came in, there was an attempt to investigate Trump's orbit.

And it was batted down in the very early weeks after January 6, saying it's premature to do that. Let's build up from the evidence and get there. The problem was, at some point in time in this investigation, they realized there was no connection between the people entering the Capitol and the people who had done some of the fake electors and more of the conspiracy type of work leading up to January 6.

As we quote in the story, there was no ladder to get from here to there to get to those other potential investigations.

June 20, 2023 |

P.D.Pepe

Comments for this entry have been disabled. Additional comments may not be added to this entry at this time.