Entitlement Run Amok

An Indian official who made headlines after he drained a dam to retrieve his phone has been fined by the government. Rajesh Vishwas has been ordered to pay 53,092 rupees ($642) for pumping out millions of liters of water without seeking permission from authorities. He had dropped the device while taking a selfie and claimed it needed retrieving as it contained sensitive government data.

But he has been accused of misusing his position.  The food inspector dropped his Samsung phone, worth about 100,000 rupees ($1,200), into Kherkatta Dam in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh last week.  After local divers couldn't find the phone, he paid for a diesel pump to be brought in, Vishwas said in a video statement quoted in the media. The pump ran for several days, emptying out thousands of litres of water, but by the time the phone was found, it was too waterlogged to work.

At the time, Vishwas had told the media that he had verbal permission from an official to drain "some water into a nearby canal", adding that the official said it "would in fact benefit the farmers who would have more water". 

But that was all of load of rubbish.  Authorities have suspended Vishwas from his post over the incident, and the state irrigation department sent him a letter penalizing him for his actions. The letter stated that Vishwas had wasted 4.1 million liters of water for his "personal interest" and that he had to pay for the water as well as a penalty for "evacuating water without permission".  It added that his action was "illegal" and "punishable under Chhattisgarh's Irrigation Act".

When first reported, the incident had triggered outrage in the country. Many politicians criticized the official's actions and said that the water could have been put to better use in a country where several regions face water shortages, especially in the scorching summer months.

 

Please Don't Forget Our Veterans

The New Republican Male

Twitter Disaster Masks a Real Danger

Ron DeSantis officially announced what has already been clear for months-- he is running for President.  But rather than popping in to make the announcement on the constantly fawning Fox News, DeSantis took his announcement to what he viewed as an even friendlier stage—a chat with Elon Musk on Twitter.

Unfortunately for the Florida governor--who squeaked into office with a 0.4% victory before being lauded as the future of the Republican Party-- his big day was reduced to another example of Musk’s often expressed policy of “fail fast and fail often,” a philosophy that, like most things Musk, was actually lifted from someone else and exposed as facile foolishness years ago. 

DeSantis was caught embarrassingly between stretches of silence that lasted minutes at a time, or when all anyone could hear was Musk or others at Twitter mumbling about their inability to fix the problem. When the event got up and running, it was mostly Musk’s army of blue-check fan-boys taking the opportunity to praise him for his mega-genius while DeSantis waited off to the side. But by focusing on the Twitter disaster, many media outlets are missing the real disaster-- that DeSantis is considered a viable candidate for president.

DeSantis’ policies include banning books, forcing educational facilities to instruct along lines of ideological purity, using government power to punish organizations that dare to speak up, sending SWAT teams after people for voting, making diversity and equality programs illegal, and enforcing bigotry against groups that constitute a small minority of the populace. These policies are textbook fascism.

Fascism that should be, and must be, recognized and denounced by the news media on every occasion when it is expressed. Treating Ron DeSantis as if he is an acceptable candidate in the mainstream of American politics is an act so dangerous that every red flag and fire alarm should be sounded. Disguising what’s actually happening by papering it over with the made-up term “Trumpism” is a deception America can’t afford.

 

The Revivalists - Don't Look Back

Amiright?

NY Times Complicit in the Rehabilitation of Gym Jordan

Last month, the New York Times ran a profile on Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, and it’s a load of absolute bullshit. The article portrays Jordan as a fighter, saying, “he has made a name for himself with bare-knuckled partisan tactics and a penchant for picking fights with his adversaries.” The story does not detail exactly how “partisan” these “tactics'' are, but that is just one problem with it.

There are five former wrestlers from Ohio State University, (where Jordan was once an assistant coach) who once said he was aware that a team doctor abused 177 athletes over two decades. Did the Times connect “bare-knuckled” partisan hack Jordan with the full breadth of the accusations against him?  Hardly.  

The "paper of record" makes sure to just barely scrape the surface of the accusations against “Gym” Jordan, even while giving the impression that those allegations have been somewhat settled.  

 "When a sexual abuse scandal at Ohio State University threatened to derail his political career, Mr. Jordan punched back in characteristic fashion, details of which have not been previously reported, calling a wrestler’s aging parents and asking them to persuade their son to back off the charge that Mr. Jordan knew about the abuse and did nothing, according to interviews conducted for this article."

The profile then moves on to detail Jordan’s rise to power within the Freedom Caucus, his early allegiance to Donald Trump, and his current position as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. After a brief bit of lip service to how utterly ineffective Jordan has been for over a decade in both the Ohio Statehouse and the House of Representatives, the Times quickly finds out how Jordan feels about himself. Stop the presses!  Jordan thinks he’s doing a great job. 

After talking about all of  the fundraising money and his very symbiotic relationship with Trump for a few more paragraphs, the article finally gets to these pesky wrestlers and their 2018 accusations that Jordan knew Dr. Richard Strauss, the former Ohio State University medical doctor who treated athletes while Jordan was an assistant coach, was molesting and being sexually inappropriate with athletes.

What is truly vacuous about this reporting and what makes the entire piece such a puff pastry is that the Times seems to have an “exclusive” interview that tells us nothing new. The writer creates an illusion that the Ohio State wrestling scandal is basically settled, because there is no deeper dive into the implications revealed by this exclusive interview.  

In 2018, after Jordan denied any knowledge of wrongdoing in the wrestling program, The Wall Street Journal quoted former Ohio State wrestler Michael Coleman as saying, “There’s no way unless he’s got dementia or something that he’s got no recollection of what was going on at Ohio State. I have nothing but respect for this man, I love this man, but he knew as far as I’m concerned.” About one month later Coleman clarified his statement to news outlets, saying that he didn’t have personal knowledge of Jordan ignoring the wrestlers’ pleas. 

In the interview, Coleman said Dr. Strauss routinely took 45-minute showers to ogle the athletes, including Mr. Jordan.  “Jim got stared at; I got stared at. Unless he has Alzheimer’s, Jim Jordan knew,” Coleman said. “But I have no knowledge of anyone being abused reporting it to Jim Jordan.”

And that is that. Nothing about the other wrestlers, who spoke pretty openly about Jordan’s work behind the scenes to get them to change their stories and make statements that contradicted the accusations. It doesn’t cover the 2020 CNN story quoting six former wrestlers who said Jordan lied when he said he was ignorant of Dr. Strauss’ actions.   Nobody in the media should be letting this creep off the hook with puff pieces like this.

 

Meanwhile, Back at the Office . . .

Not the Normal Month of May in Russia

May is traditionally a month for public celebration in Russia, with massive public processions on May 1 for Labor Day and military parades on May 9 for Victory Day, a holiday commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.   But not this year. 

Russia’s biggest trade union cancelled its traditional Labor Day demonstrations because of the “heightened risk of terrorist activity”, while regions near the Ukrainian border called off Victory Day parades so as to “not provoke” the Ukrainian army.

The Russian government warned people across the country to stay away from military installations on Victory Day, while the hugely popular Immortal Regiment, an event during which ordinary citizens all over Russia march with portraits of relatives who died in the second world war, was moved online.

Allegedly the “terrorist” threat comes from Ukraine, but it seems difficult to accept that Russia’s air defenses could not guarantee the safety of Moscow’s skies during the country’s biggest patriotic celebration of the year, particularly at a time when Putin has been stoking Russian nationalist feelings to garner support for his war in Ukraine.

It seems more likely that Putin was worried about the potential humiliation of thousands of civilians marching with the portraits of sons and husbands fallen in Ukraine. While official Russian figures have pointed to fewer than 6,000 military casualties in Ukraine, Ukraine claims approximately 150,000 Russian military personnel have been killed. Even conservative western estimates hover around the 60,000 mark – more than triple the 15,000 Soviet troops killed in the 10-year Afghan war.

The banning of public events during the May holidays was less likely out of concern for citizens’ safety, and more to do with Putin’s paranoid obsession with shutting down any channel for criticism of his war, even if open support for Ukraine is tiny and the threat of a popular uprising very remote.

At the same time that public protest is being pre-emptively suppressed, dissent and conflict continues to grow in military circles. In a 90-minute interview with a military blogger, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the de facto leader of the Wagner private military company, bemoaned the catastrophic state of the Russian army, and said that “the time has come when we have to stop lying to the population of the Russian Federation saying that everything is OK”. He sarcastically called the war in Ukraine “the so-called special military operation”, in a veiled criticism of Putin’s ban on the use of the word war to describe events in Ukraine. Prigozhin also criticised the defence ministry for withholding ammunition and threatened to withdraw his men from the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which Russia has been trying to take for nine months.

Russian nationalist pro-war military bloggers also criticise Putin. The most well-known of these is Igor Girkin (AKA Strelkov), who openly condemns Putin’s lack of resolve to use Russia’s full military might in Ukraine, and wages a simultaneous battle of words – for now – with Prigozhin. On 2 April, when another notorious military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, was assassinated in a bomb attack in a St Petersburg cafe formerly owned by Prigozhin, the Russian government blamed Ukrainian “terrorists”. Prigozhin stated that the attack was probably caused by infighting among what he calls Russian radicals.

Putin has not reacted publicly to any of the military bloggers or private armies – all armed and violent men – who criticize the way the war is being fought. But walking around with a cardboard sign calling for peace can lead to temporary arrest, and being an anti-war intellectual carries the risk of a 25-year prison sentence.

Russia is not on the verge of a popular revolution, but Putin still feels threatened enough by public anti-war protests to crack down at the first sign of peaceful civil dissent. This betrays a fundamental fear of showing any weakness that his armed critics could exploit. The main message here is clear: if you want to be safe in today’s Russia, carry a gun. Better still, create a private army. This will increase your chances of survival the day the strongman falls.

 

Death of Iconic Bird of Prey in NYC

Tributes are pouring in as New Yorkers say goodbye to Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk with a claim to being the city's original celebrity bird.  The Central Park luminary was pronounced dead, 30 years after he first settled in Manhattan's ritzy Fifth Avenue.  His nest remains at 927 Fifth Avenue.

The New York City Audubon non-profit said he had "brought joy to so many".  He "taught New Yorkers that you didn't need to go to a national park to watch nature", one wildlife chronicler wrote.  Pale Male has been the subject of an award-winning documentary, a television special, at least three books and hundreds of newspaper articles. Red-tailed hawks have an average life span of about 20 years. Pale Male never wore an identification tag and at the time of his death, he was more than 32 years old.

First arriving in Central Park in the early 1990s, the bird became well-known when he nested above a 12th floor window of the apartment building at 927 Fifth Avenue in 1993. Birding enthusiasts with binoculars would flock regularly to New York's most well-known thoroughfare to gawk at Pale Male, named by the Wall Street Journal columnist Marie Winn for his whitish plume. The carnivore shot to VIP status in 2004 when the apartment's co-op board tried to evict him and his mate because their droppings were ruining the building's canopy and raining down on the entrance way. A furious outcry ensued, with protesters standing vigil for days and sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore, a long-term tenant, slamming the move on national television as "pointless and heartless". The nest was rebuilt.

Much has been written since then about the iconic hawk, as well as the procession of partners he outlived, and offspring so numerous one naturalist described it to the New York Times as "Shakespearean levels of progeny".   "He lived at least 30 years in a challenging environment that NYC poses and there will never be another hawk as well known and loved as he was," wildlife rehabilitation expert Bobby Horvath wrote on Facebook.  Horvath, who revealed the bird had died in his care, said blood results revealed "severe renal failure" that was "beyond treating or reversing".  "Hopefully it was simply age related issues and it was just his time after an amazing unmatchable lifespan," he said.

Bruce Yolton, an urban hawk photographer, wrote that Pale Male's "biggest legacy is that he taught New Yorkers, that despite man's efforts to control the landscape of the city, nature still thrives here and needs to be respected and nurtured".   "Pale Male inspired hundreds of New Yorker's to become conservationists, and to work to protect wildlife not only in rural areas, but in their own zip codes," he added.

 

Dolly Parton - World on Fire

The Problem With Cats

In China, Comparing a Dog to the Military is No Laughing Matter

A Chinese comedy troupe has been slapped with a $2.2M penalty over a joke about the military that incorporated a slogan used by President Xi Jinping.  The quip, which likened the behavior of a comedian's dogs to military conduct, irked authorities.   They said Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media Company and comic Li Haoshi had "humiliated the people's army".  The company accepted the penalty and terminated Li's contract.

The offending remark was made during a stand-up performance in Beijing on Saturday, when Li alluded to two canines he had adopted which were chasing a squirrel. "Other dogs you see would make you think they are adorable. These two dogs only reminded me of... 'Fight to win, forge exemplary conduct'," said Li, whose stage name is House.  The punchline was taken from a  slogan that President Xi unveiled in 2013 as a goal for the Chinese military.

In an audio recording of the performance shared on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo, audience members can be heard laughing at the joke.  But it was much less welcome on the internet, after a member of the audience complained about it. Beijing authorities said they launched an investigation on Tuesday.  They then confiscated $188K of what was deemed to be illegal income, and fined the company another $1.9M, according to Xinhua.  The audio went viral, with some nationalists saying they were deeply offended and state media also piling on. But others questioned if the reactions were over the top.  "I am patriotic and really don't like others to humiliate our country... But I really don't like this atmosphere where every word about politics is sensitive," reads a post liked 1,200 times.

Shanghai Xiaoguo's activities in the Chinese capital have also been indefinitely suspended.  "We will never allow any company or individual use the Chinese capital as a stage to wantonly slander the glorious image of the PLA [People's Liberation Army]," said the Beijing arm of China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism Bureau.

Li apologized to his more than 136,000 Weibo followers. "I feel deeply shamed and regretful. I will take responsibility, stop all activities, deeply reflect, learn again."  His Weibo account has since been suspended.

The incident sheds light on the challenging climate for Chinese comedians, who have been targeted by authorities and netizens alike.  In late 2020, female stand-up comedian Yang Li was accused of "sexism" and "man hating" after making jokes about men. A group claiming to defend men's rights also called on netizens to report her to China's media regulator.

Living With the Proverbial Red Tide

Immigration Appears to Be Returning to (Disfunctional) Status Quo

Republicans have repeatedly said that the sunsetting of Title 42, a public health measure that restricted migrants during the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic, would lead to a fresh surge in attempted crossings.  But so far, that hasn't happened.

The number of migrants seeking to cross the southern US border has been “markedly down” during the past two days, bucking expectations of a surge after pandemic-era border rules expired.  The US Border Patrol “has experienced a 50% drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week,” before the restrictions known as Title 42 were lifted, Mayorkas said on CNN’s State of the Union. 

A relative calm prevailed over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, which has been receiving throngs of asylum seekers passing through neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The huge crowds of people from Central America, South America, the Caribbean and have dwindled to groups of dozens on both sides of the border.  

In the meantime, we still have a broken immigration system that Congress still needs to fix.  In addition, Congress continues to under-fund the immigration court system-- with the lack of sufficient immigration judges resulting in asylum hearings taking place three to four years in the future.

Enjoy Your Day!

Does the Thailand General Election Mean an End to the Military Dictatorship?

Tomorrow is election day in Thailand.  The Pheu Thai (For Thais) party is so far ahead of all its rivals is remarkable. This is despite all the efforts made over the past 17 years to weaken it, and to eliminate the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra, the telecom billionaire who founded its first incarnation, Thai Rak Thai, in 1998.

Thaksin's government was deposed by a military coup in 2006, and Thai Rak Thai was dissolved. He has been living in exile since being prosecuted in what his family says are politically-motivated charges. A successor party was also dissolved by the courts in 2008, and in that year, two of its prime ministers were disqualified.

After Thaksin's sister Yingluck won a landslide in the 2011 election, she too was disqualified by the courts, and her government ousted by a second coup. She is also living in exile.

In the last general election in 2019, Pheu Thai won far more seats than any other party, but was prevented by the military dictatorship from forming a government.

Now the polls show Pheu Thai on track once again for victory. The Shinawatra family has put forward Thaksin's youngest daughter Paetongtarn to lead the campaign, which she has done even in the last stages of pregnancy, eliciting admiration and sympathy.  It has once again run a slick, well-marketed campaign, making a range of appealing offers to the electorate, from a substantial increase in the minimum wage, to a promise of a 10,000 baht ($300; £240) digital wallet for every adult to be spent locally.  "I think after eight years the people want better politics, better solutions for the country than just coup d'etats," Paetongtarn told the BBC. "They are seeking policies that will help their lives."

"For many years no other political force has been able to offer an alternative to Pheu Thai, in terms of policy offerings, in terms of charisma, in being able to communicate directly with the people", says Siripan Nogsuan Sawasdee, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, who has been making a study of the party's appeal.  "And because the last coup d'etat resulted in two military-backed governments which failed miserably in economic performance and in dealing with the Covid pandemic, the popularity of its main opponent Pheu Thai remains high."

But in the latest general election, Pheu Thai is being outflanked by a more radical and youthful party, Move Forward, which is calling for profound changes to Thailand's power structures. 

It wants to stop the military from intervening in politics, to limit its budget, end conscription, and even talks about making the monarchy more accountable. It has pledged never to form a coalition with one of the military-aligned parties, showing up Pheu Thai's evasiveness on this issue.

Some observers believe Move Forward's growing popularity could eat into Pheu Thai's votes, although the younger party's support is spread across the country, rather than in certain areas, disadvantaging it in a system where 80% of the seats are elected on a first-past-the-post basis.

Pheu Thai is losing its policy edge too, as nearly every main party is now making a crowd-pleasing financial offering to the voters, neutralizing the populist appeal that has been the key to Pheu Thai's long run of election wins. "Especially for the younger generation, Thaksin's legacy of policy delivery in the past does not resonate," says Siripan from Chulalaongkorn. "And don't forget there will be four million first-time voters in this election. Pheu Thai's image as the default anti-military party is facing a real challenge from Move Forward.  "But I still believe Pheu Thai will win by a large margin. It still has the second P, the patronage networks through its candidates in the north and north-east, where Move Forward, as the newer party, has not established these kinds of connections."

If the predictions of the opinion polls hold, and both Pheu Thai and Move Forward perform well enough to ensure they have a substantial majority of the 500 seats in the lower house, the big question is whether the military dictatorship will allow them to form a government. The military-drafted constitution allows 250 senators, all appointed by the junta that seized power in 2014, to join the vote on the choice of the next prime minister. The pliant courts could once again be deployed to dissolve one or both of the reformist parties. 

The likelihood is that the junta will orchestrate a series of maneuvers to disqualify any Prime Minister that threatens their control-- even if they allow the winning party to form a government to begin with.  

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Middle of the Morning

Elon Musk is All About Free Speech, Except When it Offends India's Modi

While Elon Musk likes to complain about suppression of speech against conservatives in the United States — something that he has described as nothing less than “a battle for the future of civilization” — he appears to be failing at the far graver challenge of standing up to the authoritarian demands of foreign governments.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Twitter censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against a BBC documentary exploring Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which the officials deemed a “propaganda piece.”

In a series of posts, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.” He said that both Twitter and YouTube had been ordered to block links to the film, before adding that the platforms “have complied with the directions.” Gupta’s statements coincided with posts from Twitter users in India who claimed to have shared links to the documentary but whose posts were later removed.

This act of censorship — wiping away allegations of crimes against humanity committed by a foreign leader — sets a worrying tone for Twitter.  Elon Musk’s self-identification as a “free-speech absolutist” has been a primary talking point for the billionaire as he has sought to explain why he took ownership of the platform last year. 

Twitter even blocked Indian audiences from seeing two posts by actor John Cusack linking to the documentary. (They remain visible to American audiences.) Cusack said he “pushed out the links and got immediate blowback.” He told The Intercept, “I received two notices that I’m banned in India.” The actor wrote a book, “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said,” with celebrated Indian scholar Arundhati Roy, a fierce critic of the Modi government.

The Gujarat riots, as the violence is sometimes known, occurred in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state. A group of militants aligned with the Hindu nationalist movement, which encompasses Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, launched a violent campaign against local Muslims. Modi, who has been accused of personally encouraging the violence, reportedly told police forces to stand down in the face of the ongoing violence, which killed about 1,000 people.

“The documentary has unnerved Mr. Modi as he continues to evade accountability for his complicity in the violence,” Naik, the journalist, said. “He sees the documentary as a threat to his image internationally and has launched an unprecedented crackdown in India.”

Twitter’s moves at the behest of Modi’s government bode ill for Musk’s claims to be running the company with an aim of protecting free speech. While Musk has felt fine wading into U.S. culture wars on behalf of conservatives, he has been far more reticent to take a stand about the far direr threats to free speech from autocratic governments.

 

Holy Social Media!

Texas Governor Doesn't Want to Focus on Gun Deaths

On Monday’s edition of “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough delivered a stinging commentary, calling out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “inhumane” comments after yet another mass shooting over the weekend. Scarborough pulled no punches, citing gun death statistics and our country’s grotesque child mortality rates. “Our little children are being slaughtered. And Greg Abbott has nothing to say about it. He just wants to change the subject.”

Scarborough torched Abbot for his reprehensible comments about the victims of an Ohio mass shooting, saying the Texas Governor was “cynically and cruelly focused on the immigration status of these poor people, and that little boy that were slaughtered…. Just inhumane."

The MSNBC host saved his most sobering indictment of Abbott until the end, saying, “There is a sickness in the state of Texas. And that sickness starts at the very top with Greg Abbott—who refuses to protect little children in the state of Texas. Whether it's at school or whether it's his church or whether it's at shopping malls or even inside their own homes.”

Today’s Republican party has a sickness and complete lack of humanity, something far too many Republican voters much too readily accept.

String of Equine Deaths Overshadow Kentuky Derby

Two more horses died at Churchill Downs on the day of the Kentucky Derby, making it a total of seven horses that have perished at the racetrack in the week-long lead up to the race.

Three-year-old Chloe’s Dream was euthanized following Race 2 on Saturday, after taking a bad step leaving the first turn and being taken off in an equine ambulance, according to CNN affiliate WDRB.  In Race 8, Freezing Point pulled up suddenly and “was loaded into an equine ambulance under his own power,” Al Ruggles, the American Association of Equine Practitioners’ on-call veterinarian, told the NBC broadcast. The broadcast later said the horse was in a protective splint after suffering an injury to his front ankle before eventually being euthanized. 

The string of horse deaths cast a pall for some Derby-goers on a mostly cloudy and warm day.  “It’s concerning, and I hope they’re quickly trying the best they can to correct whatever’s going on,” said Michael Freeze, who along with his friend dressed up as jockeys. “They need to do whatever is best for the horses, and the sport in general.”

“Chloe’s Dream in Race 2 and Freezing Point in Race 8 sustained racing injuries from which they could not recover on Saturday, and for humane reasons, both were euthanized,” Darren Rogers, senior director of communications and media services for Churchill Downs, said in a statement to CNN. “The horses will be transported to the University of Kentucky Veterinary Diagnostics Lab for complete necropsies.”  

On Friday, racehorse trainer Saffie Joseph Jr. was suspended indefinitely by Churchill Downs following the “highly unusual” deaths of two of his horses, Parents Pride and Chasing Artie.

Three other horses – not trained by Joseph – also died in recent days. According to Churchill Downs, Wild on Ice, a Derby contender, was hurt while training on Thursday and Take Charge Briana was injured in a race on Tuesday. Both were “euthanized for humane reasons.”

On April 29, 3-year-old gelding Code of Kings died after flipping and breaking his neck in Churchill’s temporary paddock before a race, according to Daily Racing Form.

New antidoping and medication rules enforced by a central governing body of the sport are scheduled to take effect May 22.

“There’s something going on,” said Pat Murtha, who was attending his first Derby. “They need to find out, and set some rules and regulations to protect these animals.”

Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert, a two-time Triple Crown winner, is nearing the end of a two-year ban issued by Churchill Downs Inc. One of his horses, Medina Spirit, crossed the finish line first in the 2021 Derby and failed a post-race drug test. The horse was disqualified and Baffert was punished.

In 2019, over 30 horse deaths occurred at California’s Santa Anita racetrack, rattling the industry and leading to safety reforms. Kentucky Derby-winning trainer Rick Dutrow had his license revoked in 2011 for 10 years by New York officials. Regulators found syringes loaded with unauthorized medication in a desk in his barn. Dutrow re-opened his stable last month.

 

Unexpected Drama at Charles' Coronation

Egyptian Police Hunt LGBT People on Dating Apps

In Egypt, homosexuality is highly stigmatized, and there have long been allegations that police are hunting LGBT people online.  The BBC has uncovered evidence that the police are using dating apps to hunt down LGBT folks-- using the law on "debauchery" (a sex work law) to criminalize the LGBT community.

Transcripts submitted in police arrest reports show how officers are posing online to seek out - and in some cases allegedly fabricate evidence against - LGBT people looking for dates online.  They reveal how the police initiate text conversations with their targets. 

It is extremely difficult for LGBT people to openly meet potential dates in public in Egypt, so dating apps are a popular way to do that. But just using the apps - regardless of your sexuality - can be grounds for arrest based on the incitement of debauchery or public morality laws in Egypt.

It is not just Egyptians who are being targeted. In one transcript, police describe identifying a foreigner, who we are calling Matt, on the popular gay dating app Grindr. A police informant then engaged Matt in conversation, and - the transcript says - Matt "admitted his perversion, his willingness to engage in debauchery for free, and sent pictures of himself and his body".   Matt told the BBC that he was subsequently arrested, charged with "debauchery", and eventually deported. 

In some of the transcripts, the police appear to be trying to pressure people who seem to be simply seeking dates or new friendships into agreeing to sex for money. Legal experts in Egypt tell us that proving there has been an exchange of money, or an offer of one, can give the authorities the ammunition they need to take a case to court.

One such victim was a gay man called Laith. In April 2018, the contemporary dancer was contacted from a friend's phone number.   "Hello, how are you?" the message said. The "friend" asked to meet for a drink. But when Laith arrived to meet him, his friend was nowhere in sight. He was met instead by police who arrested him and threw him into a cell belonging to the vice squad.  Laith told the BBC that police then made a fake profile for him on the WhosHere app, and digitally altered his photos to make them look explicit. He says they then mocked up a conversation on the app which appeared to show him offering sex work.  He says the pictures are proof that he was framed, because the legs in the picture do not resemble his own - one of his legs is bigger than the other.  Laith was jailed for three months for "habitual debauchery", reduced to a month on appeal. Laith says the police also tried to get him to inform on other gay people he knew of, telling him, "can fabricate a whole story about you if you don't give me names."

Criminal gangs are using the same tactics as the police to find LGBT people. They then attack and humiliate them, and extort them by threatening to post the videos online.  The BBC tracked down two people called Laila and Jamal, who were victims of a video that went viral in Egypt a few years ago. The footage shows them being forced to strip and dance, while being beaten and abused. They are forced at knife point to give their full names and admit they are gay. They told me the duo behind the video - named Bakar and Yahia - are notorious amongst the community.

There were at least four videos in which Bakar and Yahia either appeared, or could be heard, extorting and abusing LGBT people before they uploaded the videos to Whatsapp, YouTube and Facebook. In one of these videos, an 18-year-old gay man we are calling Saeed is forced to, falsely, say he is a sex worker. I met him to hear about what happened next. He told me that he considered legal action but says his lawyer advised against this, telling him his sexuality would be perceived as more of a crime than the attack he suffered.  Saeed is now alienated from his family. He says they cut him off when the gang sent them the video in a bid to blackmail them too. "I have been suffering from depression after what happened, with the videos circulating to all my friends in Egypt. I don't go out, and I don't have a phone. No-one used to know anything about me."

There have been dozens of attacks like this-- carried out by multiple gangs. There are only a few reports of attackers being arrested.  Covering any of these issues inside Egypt itself has been banned since 2017, when the country's Supreme Council for Media Regulation imposed a media blackout on LGBT representation except if the coverage "acknowledge[s] the fact that their conduct is inappropriate".  Shockingly, the Egyptian government has spoken publicly about its use of online surveillance to target what it described as "homosexual gatherings".

 

Bebe Rexha and Dolly Parton - Seasons

May the Fourth and the Fifth Be With You

Secret Tucker Carlson Text That Triggered Dominion Settlement and His Termination

Ever since Fox News announced two weeks ago that it was parting ways with Tucker Carlson, its biggest star, speculation has raged about exactly which straw broke the network’s back. Was it the price tag to settle the Dominion lawsuit? The embarrassing texts in which Carlson privately disparaged Donald Trump even as he praised the president on the air? The video of Carlson mocking his own fans as “postmenopausal”? Still-unreleased texts in which he reportedly called a senior Fox executive a “c–t”? Rupert Murdoch’s dismay at the increasingly religious tone of Carlson’s commentary? Or (my preferred theory) some yet-to-be-disclosed act or statement pertaining to former Fox producer Abby Grossberg’s lawsuit charging Carlson and his team with “rampant” misogyny and antisemitism?

The latest explanation offered by the New York Times maintains that it was the revelation of a particular text sent by Carlson to one of his producers on Jan. 6, 2021, that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox:

Tucker Carlson January 7, 2021 — 04:18:04 PM UTC

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?

For years, Mr. Carlson espoused views on his show that amplified the ideology of white nationalism. But the text message revealed more about his views on racial superiority.  But this undisclosed text message alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion Voting Systems before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company.

The day after the discovery, the board told Fox executives it was bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into Mr. Carlson’s conduct.  The text message added to a growing number of internal issues involving Mr. Carlson that led the company’s leadership to conclude he was more of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people with knowledge of the decision. In other messages he had referred to women — including a senior Fox executive — in crude and misogynistic terms. The message about the fight also played a role in the company’s decision to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million, the highest known payout in a defamation case.

 

FBI Agents Hindered Russia Investigation, Downplayed Insurrection and tried to Block Mar-a-Lago Search

There has always been an element within the FBI that has gone out of its way to protect Donald Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election, as The New York Times was devoting every single column of the front page to the “scandal” of Hillary Clinton’s email server, a story about Trump’s connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents was consigned to a brief account on an inside page, in part because FBI sources informed the NYT that there was nothing to the story. (Note that The New York Times was well aware that an investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia was underway, but chose not to run the story until well after the election.)

In January, Charles McGonigal, the former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, was charged with money laundering for a Russian oligarch. McGonigal worked directly with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also a major part of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, and the source of many of the lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine that Rudy Giuliani tried to push in the 2020 election cycle. (Lies that The New York Times published unchallenged.)

In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, top officials at the FBI were warned that “a sizable percentage of the employee population felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” They were also warned that the agency might have difficulty investigating those involved on Jan. 6 because many agents believed that going after the criminals who stormed the Capitol was just “political correctness.”

The FBI is broken.  The latest evidence comes from a Washington Post report that FBI agents not only tried to block the search of Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents that the DOJ knows Trump was hiding, but they also tried to stop the investigation entirely at a point when Trump was still holding boxes of secret information.

The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago took place in July 2022, 18 months after Trump left the White House and almost as long after the National Archives first began trying to get Trump to return documents they knew he had taken.  Previous attempts to find those missing documents had already turned up a wealth of classified information, including documents classified as top secret and folders for other classified information that wasn’t found. The Archives, and the Department of Justice, had good reason to believe Trump was still holding other documents which he refused to return, even though Trump’s attorneys had assured them both that nothing else remained.

Previous to the July search, the DOJ was provided with new evidence that Trump was knowingly holding classified documents at his Florida resort and was showing these documents to others. But when the department ordered a warranted search of the premises, two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

There were clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president.” That included FBI agents working to “slow the probe” into Trump’s handling of classified documents. Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June, after Trump’s legal team asserted a diligent search had been conducted and all classified records had been turned over, according to some people with knowledge of the discussions.

Any law enforcement agent so slanted in their approach that they would protect someone from an investigation, even after they had proven to repeatedly lie in public, in court, and to the FBI, should have been immediately dismissed. Why is the FBI tolerating such behavior? It doesn’t take much more than a look at the very top: Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Wray was allowed to remain in office even though the agents under his command were acting to undercut the investigation into the Trump campaign’s crimes, even though one of his top officials was working directly with the Russian mob, even though his agents were expressing sympathy for those who took part in the January 6 insurgency. 

DeSantis' Attempt to Burnish His International Credentials Is a Bust

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis failed to impress British business chiefs at a high-profile London event Friday, in a tired performance described variously as “horrendous,” “low-wattage.”  The Florida governor, expected to launch his bid next month to challenge Trump as the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race, met with more than 50 representatives of major U.K. firms and business lobbying groups as a part of a four-country “trade mission” ending in London.

His trip was officially billed as an attempt to build Florida’s economic relationships with the U.K., Israel, South Korea and Japan, but it has been widely seen as an attempt by DeSantis to present himself as a statesman on the world stage.

For many of those present, however, the statesmanship was lacking. One U.K. business figure said DeSantis “looked bored” and “stared at his feet” as he met with titans of British industry in an event co-hosted by Lloyd’s of London. “His message wasn’t presidential,” they told POLITICO. “He was horrendous.”

A second business figure who was in the room said it was a “low-wattage” performance and that “nobody in the room was left thinking, this man’s going places.”  They said: “It felt really a bit like we were watching a state-level politician. I wouldn’t be surprised if [people in attendance] came out thinking ‘that’s not the guy’.”

Curiously, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak avoided a planned meeting with the GOP governor.  Instead, Sunak was at a Scottish Conservative Party conference Friday.   DeSantis did have discussions with lower-level officials, but did not discuss the prospect of a state-level economic Memorandum of Understanding between the U.K. and Florida, despite Britain’s efforts to sign similar arrangements with other U.S. states.  Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch and his team reportedly wanted to avoid talking about a Florida MOU  as others are being prioritized instead.