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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:13:24 GMT -8
These are things people actually said in court.
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ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
DeathSentence Shows He Knows How to Mislead With the Best of Them
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' team recently tried to pitch a group of wealthy donors about his viability as a presidential candidate.
But according to new analysis, the presentation was actually loaded with ominous indicators about the Florida governor's chances of toppling former President Donald Trump.
"DeSantis’ team also talked up the large share of voters in early voting states who believe DeSantis is ready to be president, with 62 percent in Iowa, 50 percent in New Hampshire, 47 percent in South Carolina, and 56 percent in Nevada," he writes. "What the talking points ignore is that 27-42 percent of voters in those states believe he’s not ready. Political campaigners know they have to boast about any metric showing net favorability. But any political observer would tell you those large negative numbers are a discouraging sign for a candidate, especially one with near-universal name ID."
Additionally, DeSantis's team showed polling of Republican primary voters revealed that they believed he was more conservative than Trump.
What they left out, Schorsch writes, is that self-identified "more conservative" primary voters nonetheless favor Trump over DeSantis by significant margins.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:15:09 GMT -8
Picking the Right Gas Station Doesn't Really Qualify You to Be President
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and his wife, Casey, interviewed each other about their favorite restaurants and gas stations.
During a Wednesday campaign event in Iowa, the governor followed his stump speech with a conversation with his wife.
Florida's first lady said she preferred pizza from gas stations and chicken from pizza restaurants.
"When you have a big state like Florida, you travel around, you learn where the good stops are," Ron DeSantis said. "And, like, we're very picky about gas stations."
"We're gas station connoisseurs," Casey DeSantis agreed.
The couple said they frequented Casey's and Wawa.
"The best one, yeah, I think we have; it's based in Texas," the governor added. "We only have two of them. They're going to build more, is Bucky's. Bucky's is really, really good."
If You Can Stand to Watch It
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:16:22 GMT -8
Not WIthout Her SonWhen 15-year-old Sasha Kraynyuk studied the photograph handed to him by Ukrainian investigators, he recognised the boy dressed in Russian military uniform immediately. The teenager sitting at a school desk has the Z-mark of Russia's war emblazoned on his right sleeve, coloured in the red, white and blue of the Russian flag. But the boy's name is Artem, and he's Ukrainian. Sasha and Artem were among 13 children taken from their own school in Kupyansk, north-eastern Ukraine last September by armed Russian soldiers in balaclavas. Ushered onto a bus with shouts of "Quickly!", they then disappeared for weeks without trace. When the children, who all have special educational needs, were finally allowed to call home, it was from much deeper inside Russian-occupied territory. To get them back, their relatives were forced to make gruelling journeys across thousands of miles into the country that has declared war on them. Only eight of the children have been returned from Perevalsk so far and Artem was one of the last, collected by his mother just this spring. When I reached the school's director by phone, she saw no problem with dressing Ukrainian children in the uniform of an invading army. "So what?" Tatyana Semyonova retorted. "What can I do? What's it to do with me?" Ukraine war: The mothers going to get their children back from Russia
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:18:08 GMT -8
I Owe. I Owe. So Off to Work I Go.Global debt currently stands at $305 trillion, $45 trillion higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF) – a global association of the financial industry. Global debt is the total amount of money owed by corporations, governments and individuals around the world. Of the $305 trillion of debt, corporations account for $161.7 trillion (53 percent), governments owe $85.7 trillion (28 percent) and individuals comprise $57.6 trillion (19 percent). The IIF predicts that global debt will continue to rise as government borrowing remains high, affected by factors such as ageing populations, geopolitical tensions, increased costs of healthcare and disparities in climate finance. How does US debt rank compared with the rest of the world?
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:19:42 GMT -8
Why? Because Veterans Aren't Subject to Discrimination. A sign with a homophobic slur outside a Florida auto repair shop has sparked backlash from the local community and social media users. The sign, which appeared to have gone up over Memorial Day weekend outside Rick’s Repair Shop in Tallahassee, said, “Veterans get a day fags and child molesters get a month why,” appearing to refer to Pride Month in June. Jackson Peel, a spokesperson for the Florida House Democrats, tweeted a photo of the sign and publicly denounced the message. “This kind of bigotry should have no place in our Tallahassee community,” Peel wrote. “It is an embarrassment and the people at Rick’s Repair Shop should be ashamed of their foolish, hurtful, and wrong words.” The viral post, which was shared Sunday, has been viewed over 900,000 times and received hundreds of responses.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:21:11 GMT -8
QOP Members Can't Find Their Hearts, Courage or Brains
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:22:43 GMT -8
It's a Long Way Off, But ...
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:24:58 GMT -8
We Aren't a Herd and There is No Such Thing as Immunity
These ‘experts’ sold the U.S. on a disastrous COVID plan, and never paid a professional price
They’ve held credentials from some of the world’s most elite universities — Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They’ve been welcomed into the highest government policy councils. They became fixtures on television news shows and were quoted incessantly by some of the nation’s leading newspapers.
They’re a cadre of academics and scientists who pushed a discredited solution to the COVID pandemic, shunning masks, school closings, even vaccines, all in the name of reaching the elusive goal of “herd immunity,” resulting in what may have been hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.
That’s the contention of “We Want Them Infected,” a painstakingly documented new book by Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at New York University and a veteran debunker of the pseudoscience contaminating our efforts to fight the pandemic.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:25:42 GMT -8
I'm Tired Just Reading About It
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:28:36 GMT -8
I Hope the Whole Sackler Family Drown in their Billions
The billionaire family that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, will receive immunity from all current and future civil claims over the company’s role in the opioid crisis as part of a deal approved by a federal appeals court on Tuesday.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit cleared the way for a settlement that would see the Sackler family pay up to $6 billion from its massive fortune derived from the painkiller business. Purdue Pharma has faced years of criticism that it helped fuel the opioid crisis in America, aggressively marketing OxyContin while misleading the public about the highly addictive pills.
The company filed for bankruptcy in 2019 amid a crush of lawsuits, but the massive settlement had been held up after a judge said in 2021 that the Sacklers, who didn’t file for bankruptcy themselves, couldn’t be protected from liability. States, local governments and those affected by the spread of opioids had grown frustrated after waiting years to see money disbursed to communities to help treat addiction and fund prevention programs while the crisis has only grown, now fueled by a surge in fentanyl use.
Tuesday’s decision could finally resolve those cases, despite initial frustration surrounding the immunity deal.
It's Blood Money
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:29:28 GMT -8
Previous Guy Promises to Ignore the Constitution
Donald Trump vowed in a campaign video released Tuesday to end birthright citizenship on “Day One” of his presidency if he wins the 2024 election.
The former president claimed the constitutional guarantee of U.S. citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, was “not working” in a lengthy, dog whistle-filled screed in which he fearmongered about criminals and people with mental health issues invading the country.
Trump, the current GOP front-runner, vowed to nullify the clause of the 14th Amendment via a simple executive order, even though the actual process required to make an amendment is “quite onerous,” per the White House,” and much more complicated.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:30:43 GMT -8
Tara Red Reade Goes Home
Tara Reade, a former Senate aide who accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault, said Tuesday she had moved to Moscow and was seeking to become a citizen, according to Russian state media.
Reade, who worked in Biden’s Senate office in 1993 for a short period, made the comments to Sputnik during a news conference, saying that although her decision was “very difficult,” she now felt “very surrounded by protection and safety.”
“My dream is to live in both places, but it may be that I only live in this place, and that’s OK,” she said. Reade was seated next to Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent who was jailed in the U.S. in 2018.
Butina now serves in Russia’s parliament.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:32:05 GMT -8
The QOP Has a Wierd Way of Cutting Spending
A Republican attempt to expand work requirements for federal food aid in debt legislation moving through Congress would increase federal spending by $2.1 billion over 10 years — far from the cuts GOP lawmakers had promised.
A compromise on the food aid requirements between House Republicans and President Joe Biden as the nation nears a disastrous government default may have backfired for the Republicans, who won the new work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for some able-bodied recipients in exchange for Democratic demands to drop work requirements for some other, more vulnerable recipients such as veterans and homeless people.
An estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released late Tuesday said that while the new work requirements in SNAP would save money, the added benefits pushed by Democrats would cost more — and add almost 80,000 people to the rolls in an average month.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:32:58 GMT -8
Coal Joe Got His Own Little Goodie
Immediately after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reached an elusive agreement with President Biden to raise the debt ceiling on Saturday, the speaker emerged from his office and called a little-known congresswoman about a once obscure energy project.
“We got Mountain Valley Pipeline done,” McCarthy told Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.), according to people familiar with the conversation.
The speaker was referring to a controversial gas pipeline that the debt limit deal sought to fast-track. Its inclusion shocked many in Washington, including several lawmakers, aides and lobbyists.
Yet the phone call, which has not been reported previously, capped a week of behind-the-scenes negotiations among House Republicans, White House officials and others over the 303-mile pipeline, which would carry natural gas across West Virginia and Virginia — over the opposition of local residents and climate activists.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a swing vote in the evenly divided Senate, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the pipeline. But House Republicans and their aides also played a key role in securing language in the debt ceiling deal to expedite the project’s completion, according to people close to the talks, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private deliberations.
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Post by mhbruin on May 31, 2023 8:35:05 GMT -8
Is ChatGPT Really a Bunch of Republicans? It Keeps Making Things Up.A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT to prepare a court filing for his client is finding out the hard way that the artificial intelligence tool has a tendency to fabricate information. Steven Schwartz, a lawyer for a man suing the Colombian airline Avianca over a metal beverage cart allegedly injuring his knee, is facing a sanctions hearing on June 8 after admitting last week that several of the cases he supplied the court as evidence of precedent were invented by ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI. Lawyers for Avianca first brought the concerns to the judge overseeing the case. “Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,” U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel said earlier this month after reviewing Avianca’s complaint, calling the situation an “unprecedented circumstance.” The invented cases included decisions titled “Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Ltd.,” “Miller v. United Airlines Inc.” and “Petersen v. Iran Air.” Schwartz ― an attorney with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman who’s been licensed in New York for more than 30 years ― then confessed in an affidavit that he’d used ChatGPT to produce the cases in support of his client and was “unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.” Schwartz “greatly regrets having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement to the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity,” he stated in the affidavit. Peter LoDuca, another lawyer at Schwartz’s firm, argued in a separate affidavit that “sanctions are not appropriate in this instance as there was no bad faith nor intent to deceive either the Court or the defendant.” The sanctions may involve Schwartz paying the attorneys’ fees that the other side incurred while uncovering the false information. This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has “hallucinated” information, as AI researchers refer to the phenomenon. Last month, The Washington Post reported on ChatGPT putting a professor on a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone, citing a Post article that didn’t exist. “It was quite chilling,” the law professor, Jonathan Turley, said in an interview with the Post. “An allegation of this kind is incredibly harmful.” Lawyer Blames ChatGPT For Fake Citations In Court Filing
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