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First Arrest in UCLA Overnight Encampment Attack

We have our first arrest tied to the vigilante attacks on the UCLA Gaza encampment overnight on April 30th. In some ways it illustrates how slow and incremental the process has been. The arrestee is an 18 year old high schooler named Edan On. He appears to be either Israeli or Israeli-American. I base this in part on his name but more on the fact that his identity was originally uncovered in part by his mother’s boasting about his role in the attack in Hebrew on Facebook. (Many American Jews know some Hebrew, or even a lot of Hebrew. But they don’t tend to use it as a casual posting language on social media unless they’re from Israel or have a family background from Israel.)

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They’ve Got a Plan?

Below I noted that one obvious way to steal the election for Republicans, if we have a 270-268 Biden win, is to reallocated Biden’s (probable) Nebraska elector to Trump. But TPM Readers ED and JP noted that when Republicans tried to change the law in advance, Maine Democrats made clear they’d do the same to even the score. I didn’t realize they’d been so public about it. But it’s very good that they did. Changing the law in advance is very different from illegally doing it after the fact. But this gives me some confidence that if Nebraska Republicans tried this and got SCOTUS to say it was okay then Maine would say “count us in too.” As they should. Still worth keeping an eye on. But this gives me a bit more peace of mind.

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Okay, This Is Worth Worrying About

 Member Newsletter

I’ve had various readers tell me that I’m saying people shouldn’t be worried about the presidential election. That’s not true at all. I want people to have a realistic sense of the situation and I want people, for lack of a better word, to worry productively. But along these lines, I wanted to mention something that legit worries me. I think we all know that there’s a high likelihood of post-election shenanigans and potentially things much worse than shenanigans, especially if Joe Biden wins but wins narrowly. But there’s one scenario that particularly has my attention.

Let me walk you through it.


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Cricket’s Poll Numbers Surge in South Dakota as Voters Give Noem Big Thumbs Down

Cricket’s Poll Numbers Surge in South Dakota as Voters Give Noem Big Thumbs Down

Gov. Kristi Noem has reacted to most of the criticism she’s received for executing her dog Cricket and lying about a meeting with North Korea’s paramount leader Kim Jung Un by saying city folk just don’t know the rural folkways of South Dakota. But it turns out Noem’s dog murdering ways are taking a toll on her support in South Dakota too. A new poll shows her job approval has dipped significantly since the Cricket imbroglio, now only just over 50% (52.2%). That’s down from an April poll which had her at 59%. And her favorability rating — which looks at personal qualities rather than job performance — is clearly in negative territory. 48% unfavorable and only 38.6% favorable.

And then there’s the big question: Was Noem justified in shooting cricket in the face just because the dog was a bit of a spaz and didn’t turn in a good performance on her first hunting outing?

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Durbin Having a Caffeinated Beverage? Possibly?

Press release just out from Durbin’s office tonight …

DURBIN: JUSTICE ALITO MUST RECUSE HIMSELF FROM CASES RELATED TO THE 2020 ELECTION AFTER ‘APPEAL TO HEAVEN’ FLAG WAS FLOWN AT HIS HOME

Durbin also called for the passage of the SCERT Act, legislation that requires Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of ethics

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Will Google Eat Everything?

You may have noticed that we have a series of new controversies or set pieces in the ongoing public conversation about AI. One of them has to do with Google search. Google recently rolled out, or in some regions is in the process of rolling out, a new AI-enabled version of search. You may have seen it already without noticing it was something new. On some searches you’ll now see that the top of your search has text under a small rubric that says “AI Overview.” This is potentially a very big deal for search and the whole ecosystem of the web.

Search, which has been dominated by Google for more than 20 years, has long been ruled by a mutually beneficial exchange between Google and websites. Google makes huge profits by running ads against its search results. It also copies small portions of other sites’ text and photographs under its theory of fair use. The justification for the profit and its use of sites’ content is that Google makes the web navigable, and it can send massive audiences to the sites that make up the web. In the first years of this century, various rights holders contested aspects of Google’s fair use policies. But they tended to lose those challenges and it became largely accepted that search, very much part of the open web, was actually good for the indexed websites.

In principle, at least, this understanding came to undergird the successful fair use arguments. Broadly, fair use says you can reproduce limited portions of a rights holder’s content if you don’t damage their ability to make money from it.

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Clarifying Polls

 Member Newsletter

We have a new set of swing state polls out this morning from Bloomberg/Morning Consult. They show a number of things, which we’ll get to in a moment. But at a meta or media amplification level they also help us again see the massive megaphone tied to the NYT/Siena poll, notwithstanding the fact that its results were questionable in the 2022 cycle and have been big (Trump-favorable) outliers for much of this cycle. There are lots of polls. But the NYT-Siena poll’s outsized impact on news headlines extends even beyond the Times own brand and reach.

So let’s look at this new set of polls.

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Low Energy, Part 2

 Member Newsletter

Let me follow up about the comment TPM Reader HS got when she called the office of her state’s senior senator, Alex Padilla. She called insisting there should be some kind of investigation into the Justice Alito flag controversy. When HS got through to Padilla’s office on the second try, a staffer told her they hadn’t yet been briefed yet on whether Padilla had a position on the issue. In response to that piece, another reader pointed me to this article from this morning in Politico.

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Low Energy

For all the endlessly merited outrage about Justice Alito being outed as the second pro-insurrection Justice (I mean, more evidence, no surprise), it seems like the response on Capitol Hill is truly low energy.

From TPM Reader HS

I’ve been a reader since the 2000 election and live in San Francisco.  When the story on Alito came out last week, I called Senator Padilla, a Judiciary committee member, and left a message about how outrageous it was and hoped that as a member of the committee, he would call for hearings and investigations (no one answered).  I also called Senator Durban’s office (picked up on first ring) and communicated the same. 

Today, I called my Senator again.  His staff person said “I haven’t been briefed on his position and I will be happy to pass on your message”   That’s it.  No response at all.  CALIFORNIA! 

Indeed, that’s the best a senator from California can do?

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Russia, Russia, Russia: Even with Trump’s non-stop transgressiveness, certain episodes stand out as especially egregious, as the kind of thing no one, including the Republican Party, would have tolerated just a few years ago, and which no one should tolerate for a moment now. Yesterday brought one such episode, when Trump baldly tied the release of WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, illegally detained by Russian, to his own re-election.

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