Crooked Media - What A Day: Back, Jack, did it again

Let’s goooooo!!!!
 

• It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. A grand jury has indicted disgraced former president Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results. The grand jury did not indict Trump on any specific charges related to inciting an insurrection, but in a brief public statement announcing the indictment, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith said, “The attack on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant.”
   

• The 45-page indictment charges Trump with four crimes encompassing three distinct conspiracies: That he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspired against the people’s rights to a free and fair election. Smith charges, “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.” Prosecutors wrote that Trump knew that his claims of the Big Lie were false, but continued repeating them to, “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.” 
   

• This is Trump’s second federal indictment and third overall in just the past four months—some serious criminal efficiency! He is still the definitive frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, holding a staggering 30-point lead among his Republican competitors despite (or perhaps because of?) his crimes. Tuesday’s indictment alleges that Trump worked with six other unnamed co-conspirators to overturn the election results “and retain power.” Trump has been summoned to appear before Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya on Thursday in Washington, DC.

The Trump campaign issued a statement saying that the indictment was a “pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 presidential election.” Lol, okay man. The Trump campaign also compared the indictment of the former president to “Nazi Germany.” The Humanities are important, folks!
 

• Trump’s Save America PAC had more than $100 million in cash at the beginning of last year. Now, it’s down to about $3.6 million after the group became more or less a gofundme to pay Trump’s staggering legal bills, including those of his aides and cronies. The Trump orbit is shuffling money between its various fundraising entities to ease the pain. Trump’s super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. (kill me) reported that it had raised more than $13 million in the first six months of 2023 and had about $30 million in cash on hand at the end of the reporting period, but the group moved $12.2 million to the Save America PAC.
   

• In other Trump-doing-corruption news, after his advisors successfully convinced the California GOP to change the rules of its state party primary, the former president will speak at a luncheon at the California Republican Party’s fall convention in Anaheim next month. Although something tells us that his schedule just got a lot tighter. 

In his brief statement, Jack Smith said that the Justice Department is committed to a speedy trial, and that the investigation into Trump’s other co-conspirators continues. He punctuated his announcement by saying, “the defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.” No promises, Jack.

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Businesses, organizations, and individuals have been trying to use generative artificial intelligence to compose full documents since ChatGPT and its peers launched. But “generative A.I.” is a bit of a misnomer, as the technology doesn’t really “generate” anything new, but rather rearranges/plagiarizes information that already exists. On top of that, it appears to have a habit of just…making shit up. Clearly uncomfortable with the idea that their technology is producing falsehoods and misinformation, A.I. companies have termed this nasty little habit as “hallucination.” According to developers, generative AI is “really just sort of designed to predict the next word, and so there will be some rate at which the model does that inaccurately.” 

The people behind A.I. say they’re working to make the technology “more truthful” (yikes) but University of Washington linguistics professor Emily Bender says that the problem “isn’t fixable,” because it’s “inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases. The inherent misinformation “glitch” is particularly grim considering that Google is already pitching news-writing A.I. products to news organizations, and the Associated Press has already partnered with OpenAI. In a world where disinformation is already so widespread, this could spell disaster for the near future of news dissemination until the problems are fixed. Maybe this will teach corporate executives the hard way that a computer program mimicking writing cannot replace actual human-generated writing, but knowing corporate executives, probably not!

Climate change is creating more frequent, wetter tropical storms, leading to longer-lasting and more widespread cholera outbreaks. Oh good!

In other terrifying climate-change news, Phoenix just ended a record-breaking streak of 31 consecutive days with temperatures at or above110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Police in Memphis, TN shot an armed man who opened fire outside of a Jewish school when he could not get in, with authorities describing it as a “potential mass shooting.” The man is in critical condition at an area hospital under police custody. 

Lt. Gov Sheila Oliver (D-NJ) has died at 71. She made history as the first Black woman to hold statewide elected office in New Jersey. 

Fitch Ratings downgraded the United States’ long-term foreign currency issuer default rating from AAA to AA+ because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy took the United States to the brink of default back in May. 

The Teamsters Union announced on Monday that troubled trucking company Yellow Corp. is shuttering and headed for bankruptcy despite hundreds of millions of dollars in federal bailout funding. 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were abolished from Walt Disney World’s governing district on Tuesday, now controlled by appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). 

Trump called on his band of goons in Congress to withhold military aid to Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with the GOP-led House Oversight Committee investigations into President Biden’s son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and China during the Obama administration. 

Devon Archer—Hunter Biden’s former business partner who was convicted of fraud in 2018—testified before the House Oversight Committee today that Hunter Biden would put Joe Biden on the phone a few times per year for about ten years when Hunter was working for foreign entities. Democrats on the oversight committee reported that Archer’s testimony supports their claim that the content of the calls was never business-related, and the committee’s Republicans won’t release the transcripts. 

Son of apartheid/tech billionaire Elon Musk has threatened to take legal action against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that studies hate speech and misinformation on social media, because the group issued a study noting that the new Musk-controlled Twitter takes no action against hate speech when the user in question is a paid subscriber to Twitter Blue. Any twitter user could have told you that!

Just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that war was “returning to the territory of Russia,” his hometown of Kryvyi Rih was hit by two Russian missiles, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more. This followed a series of apparent Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, an inkling that Kyiv is increasing its efforts to bring Russia’s war. For almost the entirety of the conflict, most of the fighting has been confined to Ukraine. On Tuesday, a high-rise building in Moscow was struck by a drone for the second time in three days. The building houses three Russian government ministries, leading the Kremlin to describe the incident as an attempted Ukrainian “terrorist attack.” In other news related to the ongoing conflict, Ukraine’s foreign minister announced it will take steps to export its grain through Croatian ports in the wake of Russia pulling out of the Black Sea grain deal. Zelenskyy stated on Sunday that he believes Russia will resume its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure this fall and winter, so his administration is moving to secure the nation’s power grid.

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has officially flipped to liberal control for the first time in 15 years on Tuesday with the swearing-in of Janet Protasiewicz, who made abortion rights a focus of her campaign. 

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order late Monday banning fossil fuels in new city construction and major renovations as part of Boston’s aim to become carbon-neutral by 2050.