Egad, A Dinesh D'Souza Movie LIED? Fetch Forth My Smelling Salts!
Next you'll say the movie's entire premise is bad just because it is.
Poor Dinesh D'Souza can't seem to get a break, apart from his pardon from Donald Trump, his constant appearances in rightwing media, and all the money he gets from adoring low-information fans. His latest documentary-shaped object, 2000 Mules, alleges there's evidence off rampant voting fraud in the 2020 election. But it's being ignored by Tucker Carlson and even Newsmax, and there's practically nothing too stupid or crazy for Newsmax.
Read More: No One Taking Dinesh D'Souza's Documentary Seriously, Except Other People Who Also Make Things Up
And now some snotty liberal fact checkers at NPR have confirmed that one of the film's central claims is just plain false. In the film, the bogus "election integrity" group True the Vote claims it used cellphone tracking data to prove massive voter fraud; to show just how reliable its methods are, the group claimed its data analysis even helped solve a MURDER that had police baffled.
But as NPR explains, hahaha LOL LMAO True the Vote didn't solve dick. (Slight paraphrase of NPR.) Also, have we mentioned D'Souza was himself convicted of election fraud? But he was pardoned, so now he's blameless.
The claim was so impressive that Donald Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington gushed that True the Vote
"solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. I mean, they are heroes." Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media.
Unfortunately, that's a load of codswallop:
Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021.
In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments.
That's not just NPR proving the claim is false; that's True the Vote admitting it didn't solve, as we say, dick.
Phone-y Business
The movie purports that True The Vote proved a massive vote fraud effort by analyzing a shitload of phone geolocation data purchased from companies what track location information from phones and other mobile devices. Supposedly, the data identifies around 2,000 people who made at least 10 visits each to absentee ballot drop boxes, many of them located in different parts of cities, as well as to a number of nonprofit groups. They're the "mules" of the title, because mail-in voting is just like drug dealing! (Yes, the movie refers to "ballot trafficking" and calls the nonprofits "stash houses," because of course it does. These may be terms Dinesh learned in prison.)
The phone data supposedly "proves" the nonprofit groups were paying people to pick up ballots and to stuff the drop boxes! But as fact checks by the AP, and by Politifact, and by the Washington Post have all pointed out, the tracking data can only indicate a general location. It isn't anywhere near granular enough to prove even that someone was standing next to a drop box, much less that they put ballots (legally or illegally) inside. And since elections authorities put drop boxes in places people are likely to find convenient, there are plenty of reasons one person might have been near those locations at various different times without going up to a ballot drop box. (In Atlanta, for instance, 28 of Fulton County's 36 drop boxes were at public libraries.)
Murder, They Vote
Now, back to the murder claim. In the movie, True the Vote's executive director Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips (who also have executive producer credits on the film) claim their analysis was so good it helped solved not one but two murders, both of which were "ebbing on cold case status." But they only talk about one, the killing of eight-year-old Secoriea Turner in Atlanta on July 4, 2020.
Phillips says he and his team obtained device data from the area of the shooting, which showed "only a handful of unique devices that could have pulled the trigger...each of these devices has a unique device ID, and we turned the bulk of this information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
"Now, I read they've arrested two suspects," D'Souza responds to Phillips.
"They have," Phillips says.
Also too, on a podcast flogging the film, D'Souza made an even more specific claim, that True The Vote gave its data to the FBI, and that the feds passed on the data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"Shortly after that," D'Souza said, "boom" - there were two arrests and indictments.
NPR contacted the GBI to fact-check this claim.
"The GBI did not receive information from True the Vote that connected to the Secoriea Turner investigation," said Nelly Miles, the GBI's Director of the Office of Public and Governmental Affairs.
Aha. Neither Engelbrecht nor Phillips would give NPR an interview, but Engelbrecht did send an email saying that she
"called a contact at the FBI" and Phillips gave him the information about the Turner case "on or about October 25, 2021."
That would have been about two months after both suspects had already been indicted, on August 13. And contrary to Engelbrecht's assertion that the case was nearly "cold," police had arrested one of the two suspects within two weeks of the murder. Indeed, he turned himself in. The second suspect was arrested in early August. As WaPo's Philip Bump points out, "There is no indication that geolocation data played a role in either arrest, much less data provided by Phillips’s team."
So nope, True the Vote didn't solve dick. Like, maybe its data did include the two suspects' phones? But by the time that analysis was done, the alleged killers' names were already in the news for a couple months. Oh look, you found their phones somehow.
Antifa Super Soldier Vote Mules!!!@!
NPR points out other problems with the movie's assertions, debunking a claim D'Souza made in an interview that the phone data also matched up with another organization's data, to prove that some of the "mules" had also been Antifa rioters!!!!!
"There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world," D'Souza said on the Dan Bongino Show. "What True The Vote did was they took the cell phone data on the mules and matched it against the ACLED data on the rioters. And guess what? There's a pretty big overlap."
In the film, Phillips also cites ACLED, which is a nonprofit research organization.
"There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests around the world. We took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta and, sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases," Phillips says in the film. "This is not grandma out walking her dog, these are, you know, violent criminals sometimes."
First of all, that Dinesh D'Souza quote right there -- "There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world" -- can only be spoken by someone utterly confident that their target audience is absolutely fucking clueless about how everything in the entire works.
Even so, Sam Jones, a spox for ACLED, said both claims were "categorically false," and that it's "highly unlikely that these conclusions have any basis in fact." ACLED's director of research and innovation, Roudabeh Kishi, noted that the company "does not track device ID" at all.
And while ACLED does track riots and other violent incidents, plus peaceful protests,
Their data do not include specific locations inside a city - such as neighborhoods or city blocks - where protests took place. ACLED does not track the time of day of those incidents or generally note individual participants, except for high-profile leaders.
Kishi said nobody from the film had contacted the company at all.
Engelbrecht had an explanation, though! When Phillips said, "There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests," he didn't mean ACLED, although she wouldn't identify where the supposed data proving "mules" had also been rioting came from. As for D'Souza's statement that the data came from ACLED, she wrote, "If you have questions about Dinesh's comments, my suggestion would be to ask Dinesh." Conveniently, D'Souza didn't respond to NPR's interview requests.
Dinesh Explains It (Not At) All
Now, we should at least note that D'Souza, grumpified by an earlier article Philip Bump wrote about the problems with trying to use phone data to prove "ballot trafficking," did sit down for an interview with Bump to explain why, logically, the movie's conclusions are 100 percent true. As Bump puts it, the takeaway is that the hourlong interview "can be summarized fairly succinctly: D’Souza admits his movie does not show evidence to prove his claims about ballots being collected and submitted."
D'Souza can't even prove that the "whistleblower" the movie claims blew the lid off the fraud scheme even exists. He never met the guy, who wanted to remain anonymous.
But he frequently tells Bump it's really unfair and illogical to demand he provide evidence that any of the "mules" the movie talks about submitted even a single illegal ballot, so that's amusing. He also accuses Bump of "armchair theorizing" about his great big MAGA fanfiction of a movie.
Read it only if you want to burn one of your free WaPo reads this month; it's not worth using one of my "gift" linkies for.
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Say Goodbye To Lukewarm Coffee! Tabs, Thurs., May 19, 2022
Um. drink it faster? It's Tabs!
Federal health officials warn that a third of the American populace lives in areas with rising rates of COVID-19, and should consider masking up indoors in public again The riskiest areas are currently in the Midwest and the Northeast US. Why no, Republicans have not agreed to pass COVID funding. [PBS Newshour]
The Biden administration still has lots of free rapid home COVID tests for you, so you can request another eight free test kits at the easy to remember covidtests.gov. Yes, even if you already received four tests in each of the two previous rounds! [NPR]
Now that genuine insurrectionist and Big Lie promoter Doug Mastriano has won the GOP nomination for governor in Pennsylvania, you may want to go back and read Eliza Griswold's May 2021 New Yorker profile outlining his "Christian nationalist" beliefs, which boil down to Jesus made America to be a Jesus country, so let's do theocracy! Gahh! [New Yorker]
They're still counting votes in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, but that didn't stop Donald Trump from jumping in with some advice for his endorsed candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz. On his MAGA social network, Trump wrote that Oz "should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they just happened to find," After all, why bother counting votes when you can just insist you won and other Republicans cheated? Hell, maybe Trump thinks the other primary candidates are Democrats. [CNN]
George W. Bush had a pretty terrible Freudian slip in Dallas Wednesday. While condemning Russia's authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin, he seemed to admit a hell of a thing:
Speaking in Dallas this afternoon, former President George. W Bush made a significant verbal slip-up while discussing the war in Ukraine. \n\nHe tried referencing what he described as the \u201cwholly unjustified and brutal invasion\u201d \u2014 but said Iraq, instead of Ukraine.pic.twitter.com/tw0VNJzKmE— Michael Williams (@Michael Williams) 1652918774
The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq ... I mean, of Ukraine.
Bush then joked "I'm 75," as the audience laughed.
4,431 US service members and several hundred thousand Iraqis, most of them civilians, were unavailable for comment forever. [Reuters]
The US Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the government watchdog set up to monitor the US military adventure in Afghanistan, released an interim report on the collapse of the Afghan military last summer, concluding that the US decision to withdraw from the country and to make a deal with the Taliban led to a catastrophic collapse of morale. The Afghan military also relied heavily on US contractors for logistical support and maintenance for the advanced weapons systems the US provided, so the US withdrawal meant those awesome war toys were next to useless. As is typical with SIGAR reports, this one found plenty of fault to go around, from corruption in the Afghan government to a lack of coordination in the US agencies that were supposed to be preparing the Afghan military to fight on its own. [NPR]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is being a butt, and has blocked bids by Sweden and Finland to join NATO. He accuses the two Nordic countries of harboring militants who belong to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which seeks an independent Kurdish state in Turkey. He's demanding they be extradited (so he can execute them, one assumes) before he'll consider letting Sweden and Finland join NATO. So that's going to need some diplomacy. [CNN]
Now here's a thing that's never going to happen: An Apple autonomous car with no windows, also no steering wheel or pedals. It's all purely conjectural at this point, but hey, concept art:
Apple's self-driving car could feature VR technology and no windows: https://vrscout.com/news/the-apple-car-could-feature-vr-technology-and-no-windows/\u00a0\u2026pic.twitter.com/YCwrVrJRjc— VRScout (@VRScout) 1652821148
Thank goodness for smartasses with photoshop:
pic.twitter.com/0EPGr74uFt— Jo (@Jo) 1652906887
Grubhub has apologized for a boneheaded promotion that offered $15 off any order to customers in New York City for three hours Tuesday, which meant lunches costing less than that would be free. Just one little problem: Grubhub neglected to tell restaurants about the plan, so many were slammed and unable to meet the sudden deluge of orders that started coming in, causing hourslong backups. As many as 6,000 orders a minute were coming in to the hub of grub, which had its own server failures to add to the confusion. Thank goodness Grubhub is very sorry. [NBC New York]
LOLOL a group called the 65 Project has filed a complaint with the Texas bar association seeking the disbarment of Ted Cruz for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in office. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy! Maybe make him ride in one of those windowless Apple cars, too. [Seattle Times]
Also, about that lukewarm coffee in the hed: it's one of those glass Chemex things, so maybe try a Chemex cozy, really hot water to start with, or putting it on the stove on very low heat. Or get a Mr. Coffee and drink coffee like it's 1975, as God intended. [NYT]
Looka this little dang Thornton and his little dang kittyhands!
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Steve Bannon Says His Kinder, Gentler Racist Nativism Different From Buffalo Shooter's Icky Murder-y Kind
If it quacks like a milkshake duck...
In the wake of the revelation that the 18-year-old white supremacist shooter in Buffalo was brain-poisoned by the Great Replacement Theory lie, Steve Bannon is flooding the zone with an epic quantity of shit.
"He’s Azov, a gay guy, he’s got all these insignias. He comes across – he said he’s a left-wing authoritarian, an eco-authoritarian," he babbled to Rudy Giuliani on Monday. "It’s in the manifesto, which they won’t release. I don’t know, just release it, it’s not gonna warp people’s mind. People can make decisions."
Speculating on motivations, Steve Bannon claimed the Buffalo shooter was \u201ca gay guy\u201d and asked where the shooter was attending church.pic.twitter.com/d6VK0PbFBu— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1652730424
Okay, first of all, Peyton Gendron's screed is a simple Google search away for anyone who chooses to read it. Is Bannon pissed that a mass shooter is being cancel-cultured by responsible media outlets who don't want to inspire the next massacre while giving free publicity to the bad ideas that inspired the current one? We don't know, but he's been flogging vile nativist ideas himself for years. And anyone who did read this demon's scribblings would immediately understand that, shitposting aside, he's not a gay eco-terrorist Ukrainian right-wing paramilitary trooper.
FFS, the man carried a gun with a racial epithet scrawled on it into a store he chose specifically because its clientele was predominantly Black, and shouted racist slurs as he went on a killing spree.
Azov? Fuck right off.
"Parents got to be on top of stuff. Why are the parents that – is this kid going to church? Is he in church?” Bannon wondered, as if being heavily churched has ever stopped a racist mass shooter before. Then he seamlessly pivoted to chastising the media for "inappropriately" blaming Tucker Carlson, who mainstreamed the very ideas about white replacement that inspired this attack.
Steve Bannon claims the media is \u201cinappropriately\u201d focused on Tucker Carlson in the wake of the Buffalo white supremacist shooting.pic.twitter.com/4dyROPBcYU— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1652728242
"This situation up in Buffalo stinks to high heaven, and of course the mainstream media's focused on the wrong thing," Bannon tut-tutted. As if the problem is the media's impropriety, not the 10 people dead because the country is awash in toxic racism.
Now watch this asshole try to distinguish his brand of poison from the low rent, generic version flogged by the racist killer.
Steve Bannon claims the "replacement theory" is a distraction after it was allegedly cited by the Buffalo shooter. The racist theory sprang from a book that Bannon has promoted.\n\n"We're not going to back off," he insisted today. "We are ascendant!"pic.twitter.com/V3H9MG7El2— David Edwards (@David Edwards) 1652713758
"We are inclusive nationalists, right?" he said, invoking "Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley" and "African Americans in droves who are understanding the lies and misrepresentations of the Democratic party."
"We're winning. This is about the sovereignty of the United States and the citizens of the United States," he rambled, before going on a riff about ceding control of the country to globalists at the World Health Organization. Oh, hey, you know who else didn't like (((globalists?)))
Bannon credited his "inclusive nationalism and participatory populism" with the 80-to-100 seat gain he thinks the GOP will make in November. Although, we can't help but notice that the GOP's plan to achieve this relies on both a massive gerrymander and making sure that broad swathes of the population cannot participate in elections.
"We're not going to stop, we are ascendant," ranted the man who used to work at the White House and who now vlogs into a microphone all day, just 18 months after his party's standard-bearer was soundly rejected by the American people.
Look, it's all shit right now, no doubt. But Bannon's little freakout is because the media is finally learning to talk about his "movement" accurately. Because the bogeyman of the week is GRT, not CRT. Because nobody outside of Fox News is talking about a lone wolf — they're talking about young men getting radicalized by Bannon and Carlson and their ilk. Because mealy-mouthed euphemisms like "racially tinged" and "controversial" are getting replaced by "racism" and "white supremacist."
It's not going to happen all at once — shit, it took 'em four years to start saying Trump lied — but it is happening. Just ask Elise Stefanik. And that little tantrum there was Bannon trying desperately to regain control of the narrative.
No. Fucking. Way.
OPEN THREAD.
[Joe My God / Crooks and Liars]
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Pick The Elizabeth Olsen Red Carpet Look That Perfectly Matches Your Energy! Tabs, Tues., May 17, 2022
Mine is at the end of this post.
It’s primary day in Pennsylvania! And we’ve got Tabs!
GOP Pennsylvania governor candidate Doug Mastriano banned the press from covering his campaign like your average wannabe despot. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Mastriano is a Trump-endorsed Big Lie promoter. If he wins the governor’s race, Democrats can kiss Pennsylvania goodbye in 2024. Don’t believe me? Read Trump’s own words from his endorsement statement:
[Mastriano] has revealed the Deceit, Corruption, and outright Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election, and will do something about it. He will also Fight Violent Crime, Strengthen our Borders, Protect Life, Defend our under-siege Second Amendment, and Help our Military and our Vets. He is a fighter like few others, and has been with me right from the beginning, and now I have an obligation to be with him
Why do certain people want to keep Pennsylvania Democrat Summer Lee out of Congress? It’s not a big mystery. (The Nation)
This is your regular reminder that the Wall Street Journal is consistently wrong. (Twitter)
How it started How it\u2019s goingpic.twitter.com/lFT3CnxiXA— KSV (@KSV) 1652717471
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland revealed he suffered a minor stroke last week. He’s expected to make a full recovery. (The Week)
Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman from Pennsylvania also had a stroke recently and is expected to make a full recovery. (CNN)
Democratic Senator Ben Ray Luján from New Mexico had a more serious stroke earlier this year. He’s also expected to fully recover. (New York Times)
Studies have shown that COVID-19 has increased the risk for strokes for everyone, regardless of age. (Healthcare Utah Ed)
Putin’s butchery threatens Ukraine’s neighbor, Moldova. (The Daily Beast)
The Root wonders if Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron can simultaneously occupy both the governor’s mansion and the sunken place. I’m sure he’ll try his best. (The Root)
Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan plus Hive political reporter Abigail Tracy suggests that Democrats might want to go into midterms with a clearer message. (Vanity Fair)
This guy is feeling nostalgic about the iPod. However, I’m sort of like Alton Brown when it comes to electronics — no unitaskers! (Vice)
Pasta bowls are often the go-to serving vessel in my home. (Bon Appetit)
Here are some nice dining spots in my old Seattle neighborhood. (Eater)
Elizabeth Olsen and I have very similar skin care regimens.
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