Head above water // What's Good: Sep. 23, 2022

Accidental Russia, several frauds, and a bad book.

Sep 23, 2022

Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. I got some terrible news on Wednesday, although I have tried to compose for you a newsletter of reasonable quality all the same. Actually, there is a significant amount of content this week. Please do not worry about me, I will be alright. Tragedies just tend to find us when we least expect them.

Remember to vote, comrade

This is just a beautiful blunder, honestly:

House Republican leaders on Friday unveiled their “Commitment to America” agenda for 2023 ― and with it, an inspirational video full of scenes presented as exceptional imagery of America that were actually stock footage from Russia and Ukraine.
The GOP’s video, “The Preamble to the Commitment to America,” opens with a narrator highlighting aspects of what it means to be an American.
“We celebrate the rich heritage of the American story and the vibrancy of the American Dream,” the voice says, over footage of a drilling rig at sunrise.
But this video snippet, an apparent nod to America’s natural resources, wasn’t filmed in America. It’s stock footage created by Serg Grbanoff, a filmmaker based in Russia.

Follow the leader

Another week, another grifter:

Despite escaping the cultlike grasp of the so-called QAnon Queen of Canada months ago, two of her closest former followers had their bank accounts closed and say they may lose their children’s college funds after working for their former sovereign.
On Sept. 3, Corey and Daisy, who are married, received a letter in the mail from their bank that said they were now “an unacceptable risk” and their accounts would be closed. Earlier in the year, Romana Didulo, the self-described “queen,” had used their bank accounts to raise over a hundred thousand dollars for the cross-country RV tour of Canada she’s currently on.
After opening accounts at a new bank, Daisy said the institution told her she could lose as much as $8,000 CAD ($5,952 USD) in government contributions from their education savings plans. They’re trying to fight it but don’t have high hopes.

Probably we should do something about the international rise of grifting that has been dovetailed with dodgy political promises. It just seems like a serious issue that is becoming more and more troublesome. Who am I to say, though.

Flag on the play

What is it about celebrities and doing fraud? They just seem to love it:

A former head of Mississippi’s welfare agency agreed to terms on a plea with federal and state prosecutors on Thursday, a major turn in an investigation that could spell trouble for Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre.
John Davis, the former director of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services, pleaded guilty Thursday for his role in the widening scandal related to more than $70 million in misappropriated welfare funds in the state with the highest level of poverty in the nation. As part a plea agreement, Davis has agreed to cooperate with investigators.
Davis had previously been indicted for more than two dozen state and federal charges as part of the scheme. Nancy New, the head of a nonprofit used to funnel welfare funds, pleaded guilty to 13 felonies for her role in the fraud in April.

I did not have “Brett Favre stealing welfare money” on my 2022 bingo card but I guess that’s just where we’re at these days.

Democracy for me but not for thee

This just does not seem like a healthy sign for our republic:

A Michigan candidate for the US House backed by former President Donald Trump once railed against giving women the right to vote, arguing that America has “suffered” since women’s suffrage.
John Gibbs, who defeated in the primary an incumbent Republican who had voted to impeach Trump, also made comments in the early 2000s praising an organization trying to repeal the 19th Amendment which also argued that women’s suffrage had made the United States into a “totalitarian state.”
As a student at Stanford University in the early 2000s, Gibbs founded a self-described “think tank” called the Society for the Critique of Feminism that argued women did not “posess (sic) the characteristics necessary to govern,” and said men were smarter than women because they are more likely to “think logically about broad and abstract ideas in order to deduce a suitable conclusion, without relying upon emotional reasoning.”

Quiet part loud

There is a sort of unspoken expectation around people who exist in and report on our nation’s most significant institutions - they are supposed to be respectful and respectable, they are supposed to act with the dignity the institutions demand, and they are supposed to be upholding a solemn commitment to the public good. But, you know, the more we learn about the people in around those institutions, the more it becomes plainly obvious that we have been fed some bullshit:

Nina Totenberg, the longtime NPR legal affairs correspondent, has a defiant message for her haters in her new book Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships. Despite persistent criticisms of her decades-long friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg—including an assessment from NPR’s public editor in September 2020, shortly after Ginsburg’s death, that NPR should have disclosed the friendship early and often—Totenberg chose to write a turgid memoir centering that friendship. It’s a “don’t even bother coming for me” response, emphasizing her choice to spend decades flouting basic ethical standards. Get in, losers: We’re going self-aggrandizing.
There are two main problems with Dinners with Ruth, a book written in the cadence of your airplane row mate who won’t stop broadcasting their meandering life story. First, Totenberg blithely casts her relationship with Ginsburg as something to be celebrated rather than criticized. Second, by depicting the justices—her pals—as foibled geniuses, she ignores the power they wield as unaccountable super-legislators eager to take your civil rights away and transfer them to a corporation in need.
Dinners With Ruth works through an identity crisis in real time: Is it a biography, a memoir, or yet another spine on the shelf of Supreme Court “behind the curtain” books? Totenberg herself doesn’t know, as the book caroms among biographical sketches, under-detailed anecdotes, and surface-level Supreme Court case summaries. Don’t read this if you want expert legal analysis, let alone a mea culpa for the years Totenberg spent reporting on people she was also inviting to dinner parties. Do remember to bring an insulin shot for the treacle.

Justice deferred

Prosecutorial misconduct is difficult to quantify and harder to shine a light on, but every so often there is a particular case that gets some attention. As I’m sure you all know, Adnan Syed is one such case:

On Monday, a Maryland judge overturned Adnan Syed’s first-degree murder conviction for the 1999 death of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. He exited the Baltimore courthouse to deafening cheers from a large crowd gathered outside. The 41-year-old is free for the first time since he was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 17, a saga memorably recounted by the smash-hit podcast Serial.
The case against Syed hinged on the testimony of his friend Jay Wilds, who told the jury that Syed showed him Lee’s body after placing it in the trunk of a car and enlisting his aid in helping dispose of it in a neighborhood park. But Wilds, who was given a lawyer by the prosecution and never charged, made statements that varied over time and with respect to key details. Crucial to corroborating Wilds’s shifting, incentivized account were cell-phone records that purportedly proved that Syed received calls in the park area around the time that he claimed they were burying Lee. Twenty-three years later, prosecutors now concede that their case against Syed was little more than smoke and mirrors. Worse, they had cheated in their zeal to win, burying key evidence.

Our court system is of course meant to be backed by the principle that it is better for many guilty people to go free than for any innocent person to be convicted. Nevertheless, here we are. Adnan’s case is only one of many, and there are countless individuals whose cases will never get such scrutiny.

On your left

I have long been a vocal critic of Shaun King’s grifter tactics. It’s important to understand that while the scam-as-career ethos does seem to be more prevalent on the right, there is no lack of it on the left, either. And, importantly, the folks doing it on the left are often hailing themselves as some kind of savior or messiah. That was Shaun King’s modus operandi. Still is, really. But here’s how the sausage gets made:

Shaun King’s nonprofit amassed millions of dollars in donations in the months following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, while its signature project to review and redress prosecutorial injustices in three major U.S. cities floundered—and while King himself and his associates raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation.
Representatives of the Grassroots Law Project produced the 2020 financial reports for the King-led outfit in response to questions from The Daily Beast. These materials have yet to appear in any public records database, and the Internal Revenue Service did not respond to queries about why the King nonprofit did not show up in its online files. But the Grassroots Law Project’s lawyers noted the agency had suffered internal delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The tax documents reveal that during the first year of its existence, a period that coincided with the largest racial justice protests in the nation’s history, the organization collected more than $6.67 million. Further, Federal Election Commission records also show that two political action committees tied to the controversial activist have poured close to half a million dollars into the organization.

Meanwhile across the aisle

Other grifters are much more obvious:

THIS SUMMER, DONALD Trump is taking something that began during his presidency to a whole new level. His dalliance with content connected to QAnon — the deranged pro-Trump conspiracy theory that features tales of powerful Democrats running a pedophilic secret society — has gone from a game of footsie to what appears to be an open embrace. But if you ask members of the ex-president’s inner orbit why this is happening now, you get a mix of responses, including abject confusion.
“Fuck if I know,” one Trump ally replied to Rolling Stone when asked this month why the most powerful figure in the Republican Party has been so publicly promoting Q symbols and messages, particularly on his own social media app, Truth Social. Others close to the ex-president (most of whom just like to pretend this isn’t happening) say that conversations with Trump that have touched on this topic in recent months paint a clearer picture — one of a Boomer internet troll who just loves to be liked. And one thing that QAnon adherents really, really like is their supposed god-emperor Trump.
“He’s said that he thinks some of their memes and images are ‘funny,’” says another person close to Trump, who has heard the former president privately weigh in on Q-boosting Trump fans since leaving the White House. “He also sometimes mentions that it’s hilarious to make people like you [in the media] so mad when you see him touch the Q shit … But to be fair, he says that they’re some of his biggest fans, which, you know, is his thing.”