July 4, 2022

Fox and friends confront billion-dollar US lawsuits over election fraud claims

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/04/fox-oan-newsmax-lawsuits-election-fraud-claims

'In the $1.6bn lawsuit, Dominion accuses Fox Corp, and the Murdochs specifically, of allowing Fox News to amplify false claims that the voting company had rigged the election for Joe Biden.

Fox Corp had attempted to have the suit dismissed, but a Delaware judge said Dominion had shown adequate evidence for the suit to proceed. Dominion is already suing Fox News, as well as OAN and Newsmax.

“These allegations support a reasonable inference that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion,” Judge Eric Davis said.'

Tick Tock, you fuckers. (my words)

July 4, 2022

Professor Heather Cox Richardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-3-2022

America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”

“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually to include women.

But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words to live by in 2022.

—

July 3, 2022

The Donald and Rudy Show: How it all began

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/18/trump-giuliani-ukraine-lawyer-new-york-history-friendship-229857/

Friends With Benefits: Donald and Rudy’s Long, Strange Partnership

'Long, long before he was Donald Trump’s personal attorney and devoted defender, Rudy Giuliani wasn’t exactly a fan. The first time, actually, he invoked Trump’s name in a high-profile, high-stakes setting, Giuliani was the prosecutor in a public corruption case...The setting was the federal courthouse in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1986. Giuliani was the top gun from the Southern District of New York. And the main defendant, accused of taking kickbacks from companies for whom he helped score contracts with the city’s Parking Violations Bureau, was Stanley Friedman—a former deputy mayor, the Democratic Party chair in the Bronx and a lobbyist who the year before had netted nearly a million dollars.

Trump wasn’t on trial but Giuliani didn’t do his reputation any favors. Giuliani sketched for the jury what he called this “cesspool of corruption,” this tale of “plunder,” this story of “the buying and selling of public office.” Knitting the men together, Giuiliani cast Trump as a preeminent beneficiary of Friedman’s expansive, crooked clout....The trial heralded the end of an era of municipal malfeasance, and the moralistic, crusading Giuliani crowed. “I don’t think there’s anybody much worse than a public official who sells his office, except maybe for a murderer,” he told Vanity Fair.

“Rudy wanted to be relevant again and Trump gave him that platform.”...And it’s not like Giuliani jumped at the chance to back Trump right when he came down that escalator. It took him 10 months to endorse Trump. Once he was in, though, he was … all in.

“I didn’t find it curious when all of a sudden there was Rudy as a Trump supporter,” former Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger said when we talked this week, “because he’s interested in power. I think he was a person who was singularly unhappy being out of power.”

“Because he’s got the same amount of hubris and the same Achilles’ heel that Trump has,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said, “which is that he hungers for and thrives on being in the public spotlight and cultivating power. And I think he saw Donald as a vehicle toward being a player again. It’s a lesson in abject thirst for power.”'

July 3, 2022

Summer 1964: "Freedom Summer", Civil Rights, and getting out the vote

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-2-2022

Letters from an American:

'Americans, Black and white, southern and northern, eager to defend the right of all Americans to vote, planned to register Black people for the upcoming election...Just as they were getting underway, on June 21, three voting rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

President Lyndon B. Johnson...was determined to pass the stronger civil rights bill...The House passed the bill on February 10 and sent it on to the Senate, where everyone knew the southern segregationists would not give up easily...And they didn’t...southern Democrats launched a filibuster....“We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”

...Republican Everett Dirksen (R-IL), the Senate minority leader, managed to deliver enough Republican votes to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) to break the filibuster...The Senate passed the bill on June 19 and sent their version back to the House...Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2...

Johnson addressed the American people...“those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.”...Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions—divisions which have lasted all too long. Its purpose is national, not regional. Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.”

“We will achieve these goals because most Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right,” he said. “My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”

On August 4, the U.S. had a powerful example of what certain Americans thought of as “extremism in the defense of liberty” when the missing bodies were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and it turned out that Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, had murdered them.

Voters in the 1964 election continued to back Johnson’s vision of the world, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide.'