Palin Archives - The New Neo

The Palin-ization of Casey DeSantis

neo — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 19:45:58 +0000

Hate sells. Sneering, condescending hate sells. And of course, all conservatives are to be hated. So this sort of thing was inevitable (“Casey DeSantis is the Walmart Melania Trump”), and it’s getting a ton of clicks and attention. It reads like a parody of the left, but unfortunately it’s not.

Including attention from me. But you don’t have to click on the article itself, if you don’t want to. I’ll embed this clip in which Megyn Kelly reads excerpts in a suitably snarky voice:

And here’s none other than Piers Morgan – yes, Piers Morgan – discussing the Daily Beast piece:

Can you spot the difference between these two sentences:

1. Florida is where woke goes to die.

2. Florida is where the woke go to die.

Not difficult, right?

The first clearly refers to a pseudo-fascist ideology that most definitely needs to be killed off, as Florida Gov. and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has been waging a successful campaign to do in his state.

The second, equally clearly, refers to actual woke people going to Florida to be killed….

Let’s be clear: Katie Baker [author of the Daily Beast piece] knew what Casey DeSantis’ coat statement meant.

Frankly, a lobotomized warthog knows she was talking about woke ideology, because that’s what Ron has been talking about incessantly all year, in unambiguous context.

Self-evidently, she doesn’t mean woke people go to die in Florida, because that would make her a horrendous human being who wants to kill people.

Yet that’s exactly what Baker wants you all to think Casey DeSantis is.

Expanding on her dangerously disingenuous theme, she wrote: “Florida under DeSantis has had one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation, even as he’s exulted in his anti-mask policies. And as the governor whips up anti-LGBT sentiment and bans books on race, Casey’s jacket and its message of death also bring to mind the horrific Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, not to mention the state’s shameful history of Jim Crow-era lynch mobs and the Rosewood massacre … the jacket, then, is a warning: Watch out, America.”

Again, wow.

I don’t have too many “wows” left in me for this sort of thing. The first time I noticed it going full bore was when Sarah Palin was running for VP in 2008, but it has a long antiquity. Arguably, Robert Bork was a male recipient, although for men it takes a different form and doesn’t usually involve appearance or garb. When this weapon is wielded against women, it especially originates with other women, and it takes the form of what used to be called “cattiness,” although it’s cattiness of an extreme nature.

And it works. Hate is apparently fun, and the internet and then retweets on social media are great ways of spreading it and ramping it up.

Snobbery is also apparently great fun. Hating Casey DeSantis is a twofer. It allows people on the left to spitefully look down on her as a classless Walmart-type shopper, and to feel superior, but then to get themselves off the guilt hook for being snooty snobs because that person they are looking down at with such classist condescension is actually a hateful Nazi herself. Win/win.

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Palin loses – what does it mean?

neo — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 18:32:10 +0000

I tend to think there are too many special things about this special election to come to many general conclusions.

The first special thing is Palin herself: my sense is that she’s no longer all that popular in Alaska, somewhat of a has-been. Her quitting the governorship probably didn’t sit all that well, either.

The second special thing is that the winner only has a few months in office before this election repeats itself and the voters will get another chance at essentially the same election, only this time for the full Congressional term.

The third special thing is ranked choice voting. That is very special indeed, and I’d like to keep it as rare as possible. Here’s how it works in Alaska:

Elections in Alaska now start with an “open” primary, in which candidates of all parties compete and all voters are allowed to participate, casting their ballots for the one contender they prefer. The top four vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election.

Then, in the general election, instead of just voting for one of the top four candidates, voters rank their preferences in order. They are allowed to rank candidates one through four, but are not required to do so — voters could instead choose only to rank their preferred candidate, or only rank their top two.

If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-place votes, then the ranked-choice system is used to determine the winner.

First, the Alaska Division of Elections eliminates the candidate with the least amount of first-place votes. The votes that had gone to that candidate are then assigned to the second choice listed on those voters’ ballots.

If no candidate has topped 50% of the vote at that point, then the Division of Elections would go through a second round of tabulation. The fourth-place candidate would have already been eliminated, and in the second round, the third-place finisher would also be eliminated.

Those who ranked the third- or fourth-place candidate first would have their votes assigned to the highest-ranked remaining candidate on their ballots.

It is too much like a game of “Survivor,” and much too susceptible to misunderstanding by voters, as well as to winners who are not really favorites.

Whether the voters in Alaska were just sick of Palin, or whether ranked-choice voting made the difference, is unclear at this point. For two divergent views, please see this from Bonchie at RedState and this from Scott Johnson at Powerline.

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Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the Times…

neo — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 21:22:22 +0000

…is ongoing, and recently one of the Times’ editors made a funny (emphasis mine):

James Bennet, the former New York Times editorial page editor, said Wednesday that an error he wrote into a 2017 editorial about Sarah Palin stung particularly hard because it made the newspaper’s editorial board appear partisan…

“It’s just a terrible thing to make a mistake. I’ve edited and written hundreds of pieces on deadline, thousands. I have made very few mistakes, at least ones that I know of,” Bennet said.

“I made one that night. And it’s terrible. And it’s a mistake … that made it look like we were being partisan. It’s extremely important for the editorial board to have a reputation to call balls and strikes without partisanship,” he added.

Can he be charged with perjury for that? Yeah, that’s a joke on my part, but not entirely, because it is so blatantly obvious, and has been for decades, that the Times is nothing if not partisan.

Bennett’s statement is self-serving, of course. But does he really expect us – or a jury – to believe it? The other question, of course, is the old “knave vs. fool” one – does he actually believe it? I very very much doubt it, but then again there’s almost no limit to a “journalist’s” (or many people’s) capacity for self-delusion and the need to wrap him or herself in the mantle of virtue.

Note also the way Bennett frames this: “It’s extremely important for the editorial board to have a reputation to call balls and strikes without partisanship.” He doesn’t say, “It’s extremely important for the editorial board to call balls and strikes without partisanship;” he says it’s important to give that appearance and have that reputation.

Here’s what Palin said in today’s testimony:

“I felt powerless,” Palin told the jury while being questioned by her attorney, Kenneth Turkel.

“If I wanted to raise my head and try to get the word out, I knew I was up against Goliath,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure of the “stones” she could use to respond.

She described the Times as the “end-all and be-all” of the media and said it was devastating that one of the largest newspaper in the country had linked her to a mass shooting that killed six people and wounded others.

Because of Sullivan, I believe Palin will have a very tough time winning this case.

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New York Times Company v. Sullivan again, in light of the Palin lawsuit

neo — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 22:50:05 +0000

Sarah Palin is suing the NY Times for defamation: This is the issue:

At the center of the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee’s federal suit is a 2017 editorial that incorrectly linked Palin to the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona where six people were killed and more than a dozen were injured, including then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

The editorial “falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Mrs. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011, shooting rampage at a political event in Tucson, Arizona,” lawyers for the one-term Alaska governor wrote in the complaint…

For Palin to win, her lawyers can’t just prove the Times was wrong, which the paper has already said it was. She must show that the editors and writers at the paper acted with malice, ignoring the facts on purpose to sully her name. The Times has called it an “honest mistake” that happened in a rush on deadline.

But the Times had already published earlier articles indicating it already knew the assertions in their 2017 editorial were false, so unless they don’t know what’s in their own paper, they shouldn’t be able to plead ignorance successfully. And yet, under New York Times Company v. Sullivan, the case that established the “actual malice” standard, they may be able to do exactly that.

The Palin case reminds me of a post I wrote about a year ago about the “actual malice” standard for defamation lawsuits against the press, an almost impossibly high bar to a plaintiff succeeding in such lawsuits even with egregious defamation on the press’s part. And so the rest of this post is going to be a repeat of that earlier post.

When I first learned about Sullivan back in law school aeons ago, I remember being disturbed by the case. It’s not that I had a better solution. But it was easy to see the problem: how best to balance the need to have a free press with the need to protect people, even people in public life who are written about a great deal, from libel?

Sullivan‘s solution – to raise the bar for libel exceptionally high and to make actual malice (“meaning that the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether or not it was true”) necessary for a defamation finding against the press when a public person is the one maligned – presents the dangers of lies going unchecked and running rampant. But muzzling the press unduly isn’t good either.

Back in 1964, when the case was decided, the situation was exceedingly different than it is today. Now we have a press that has no regard for truth, is almost wholly partisan and firmly on the left, and willing to do almost anything to help its side win.

As with so many other things, none other than Donald Trump recognized the problem, since he has been the target of it. Even back during his 2016 campaign he was critical of the ruling, for obvious reasons:

One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we’re certainly leading. I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” Trump said.

I’m not sure how he thought he might do that, but at any rate it didn’t happen, and things have only gotten worse with the shameless and naked partisanship of the press plus the power of social media.

Even as early as 1985, one of the justices who voted for Sullivan expressed regret:

[I]n a 1985 case that helped refine how the Sullivan ruling applied in when a plaintiff was neither a public official nor a public figure, Justice Byron White expressed regret for the “actual malice” test that he had agreed with in Sullivan. “I have,” he wrote, “ … become convinced that the Court struck an improvident balance in the New York Times case between the public’s interest in being fully informed about public officials and public affairs and the competing interest of those who have been defamed in vindicating their reputation.” Chief Justice Warren Burger, who joined the court four years after Sullivan was decided but presided over the several of the cases that refined the Sullivan standard, agreed with White in his own concurring opinion.

Justice White’s description of the competing interests as he saw them is quite interesting. He sees on one side “the public’s interest in being fully informed about public officials and public affairs” and the other side as “the competing interest of those who have been defamed in vindicating their reputation.” Public versus individual interest – I believe that’s the traditional view. But what of the public’s interest in being informed of the truth rather than falsehoods? Do we not all have an interest in that? However, who determines what’s true and what’s false? After all, the MSM and social media gatekeepers and the left (redundant, I know) keep saying it’s they who tell the truth and those on the right who lie.

Justice Clarence Thomas also critiqued Sullivan back in 2019, saying that it and subsequent allied rulings “were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”

And yesterday Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan-appointed judge on the DC Circuit Court, issued a scathing dissent in a defamation case that’s gotten some attention:

The New York Times and The Washington Post are “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” while the news section of the Wall Street Journal “leans in the same direction,” U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman said. He said the major television outlets and Silicon Valley giants were similarly biased.

“One-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy,” Silberman wrote. He exempted from his criticism of “Democratic ideological control” Fox News, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. But he lamented that these outlets are “controlled by a single man and his son,” a reference to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and questioned how long they could hold out.

Here’s a sample of the actual wording of the dissent:

After observing my colleagues’ efforts to stretch the actual malice rule like a rubber band, I am prompted to urge the overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan. Justice Thomas has already persuasively demonstrated that New York Times was a policy-driven decision masquerading as constitutional law. See McKee v. Cosby, 139 S. Ct. 675 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring in denial of certiorari). The holding has no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution, and it baldly constitutionalized an area of law refined over centuries of common law adjudication. See also Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 380–88 (1974) (White, J., dissenting). As with the rest of the opinion, the actual malice requirement was simply cut from whole cloth. New York Times should be overruled on these grounds alone. …

One can understand, if not approve, the Supreme Court’s policy-driven decision. There can be no doubt that the New York Times case has increased the power of the media. Although the institutional press, it could be argued, needed that protection to cover the civil rights movement, that power is now abused. In light of today’s very different challenges, I doubt the Court would invent the same rule.

As the case has subsequently been interpreted, it allows the press to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity. It would be one thing if this were a two-sided phenomenon. Cf. New York Times, 376 U.S. at 305 (Goldberg, J., concurring) (reasoning that the press will publish the responses of public officials to reports or accusations). But see Suzanne Garment, The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics 74–75, 81–82 (1992) (noting that the press more often manufactures scandals involving political conservatives). The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions. Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press leading to a “bland and homogenous” marketplace of ideas. See Hale v. FCC, 425 F.2d 556, 562 (D.C. Cir. 1970) (Tamm, J., concurring). It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat.

Much much more at the link. At the end of the article there, you can find links to a whole bunch of pieces reacting to Silberman, many of them – of course – from the leftist press.

I’m with Silberman, and have been from even before my political change. However, the problem of the proper standards remains – and of course, it’s not just the press that is biased to the left at this point. A great deal of the judiciary is as well. So I’m not sure the remedy lies in the judicial system at all.

In closing I’m going to include a quote offered this morning by commenter John Tyler, something William Shirer wrote as part of his reporting from Nazi Germany in the 30s:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.

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Judge dismisses Palin defamation lawsuit against Times

neo — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 20:31:28 +0000

Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the NY Times has been thrown out of court:

This is a case where the NY Times Editorial author James Bennet claimed to be so ignorant, so uninterested in doing any research, and so oblivious to his surroundings, that his ignorance turned into legal bliss.

[From the Opinion]:

Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States. In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be made, some of which will be hurtful to others. Responsible journals will promptly correct their errors; others will not. But if political journalism is to achieve its constitutionally endorsed role of challenging the powerful, legal redress by a public figure must be limited to those cases where the public figure has a plausible factual basis for complaining that the mistake was made maliciously, that is, with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard of its falsity…

We come back to the basics. What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.

The key legal standard here is the definition of “reckless disregard” of a statement’s falsity. I’ve skimmed the entire Opinion, and it seems to rest on that element alone.

Here’s how the court put it:

Reckless disregard can be established by evidence of an intent to avoid the truth, Harte-Hanks Comrns., Inc. v. Connaugnton,…defendant entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication, St. Anant v. Thompson, 390 U.S. 727, 731 (1968), or evidence that the defendant acted with a high degree of awareness of [a statement’s] probable falsity, Garrison v. State of Louisiana, 379 U.S. 64, 7 (1964). See Dongquk Univ. v. Yale Univ., 734 F.3d 113, 124 (2d Cir. 2013). But even then, a defamation complaint by a public figure must allege sufficient particularized facts to support a claim of actual malice by clear and convincing evidence, or the complaint must be dismissed. Here, as already mentioned, the complaint fails on its face to adequately allege actual malice, because it fails to identify any individual who possessed the requisite knowledge and intent and, instead, attributes it to the Times in general. This will not suffice. When there are multiple actors involved in an organizational defendant’s publication of a defamatory statement, the plaintiff must identify the individual responsible for publication of a statement, and it is that individual the plaintiff must prove acted with actual malice…[T]he state of mind required for actual malice would have to be brought home to the persons in the [defendant’s] organization having responsibility for the publication of the [statement].

One would think that a newspaper publishing an accusation against a public figure without any basis whatsoever for that accusation and without doing any research or even making an attempt to ascertain whether the facts are true or not (the situation here) would be guilty of “reckless disregard” of that accusation’s falsity. But that’s not the way it went, at least not in the US District Court of the Southern District of NY, which handed down the ruling.

It would seem that there’s no requirement for even a very basic due diligence in researching an article or editorial if it’s about a public figure (and certainly the vast majority of such articles probably concern public figures). As I interpret this, newspapers are free to write nearly anything about a public figure as long as there is no recording or memo in which the reporter or editor says “I know, or strongly suspect, that this is false but I hate this public person so much that I want to damage him or her, and therefore I am going to print this known or strongly suspected falsity without checking on whether it’s true or not, because I want to defame this person I hate.”

To defend against any lawsuit by a public figure, all that writers or editors have to do allege is this:

A while back, when I first heard about the Palin lawsuit, I thought it had great merit. But I also thought she would not win:

No wonder Palin is suing. But I don’t think she’ll win. Maybe she doesn’t expect to; maybe she just wants to highlight the devious duplicity of the Times. I don’t think the suit will succeed because the standards for defamation of a public figure are so very high, and this involves a PAC rather Palin herself anyway.

Well, the court ruled that even though a PAC was involved, Palin herself was implicated by the editorial. So that last bit—which I thought might be the basis for a dismissal—was not the basis for the dismissal after all. The court found in favor of Palin in that regard because the way the editorial was worded (for example, not even naming the PAC but specifically naming Palin) was deemed to implicate Palin. It was actually that first part “the standards for defamation of a public figure are so very high” that formed the basis of the suit’s dismissal.

The real question is this, and has been for quite some time: what legal duty does a newspaper have to find out the basic, easily obtainable truth about some action of a public figure before they print an article on the subject? If the paper’s writers or editors make no effort at all, is that malicious or is it just negligent and/or stupid and lazy? Or can they print anything they want out of sheer incompetence and willful ignorance?

The power of the press is profound. Unless there’s a smoking gun where the writers or editors admit to knowing their statements were most likely false, they are home free. The press shouldn’t be burdened with the need to get everything right, of course, or to research things to death in order to protect against an endless series of lawsuits. But shouldn’t some very basic and minimal standards of fact-checking when making a serious allegation of wrongdoing by a public figure be in place? Should the press be virtually free to print whatever it wants and protect itself by claiming ignorance? With the enormous protection the press has under the law—a protection that is extremely important to our liberty, I might add—should there not be some minimal responsibility?

As one commenter at Legal Insurrection wrote: “incompetence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for libel by the msm.”

Here’s one more comment at LI:

In Sullivan, the SCOTUS established an second, totally unequal standard for libel for public figures than for the rest of the citizenry. It essentially rewrote its own libel standards by establishing a lower class of citizen, the public figure who was not protected by the 1st Amendment to the same extent as the rest of the citizenry. NYT v Sullivan was nothing more than the national elite protecting the elitist news media, the NYTs. 53 years later, nothing has changed

Well, I think Sullivan was the elite protecting the news media. But I don’t think it was “nothing more” than that. It was protecting freedom of the press, elite or otherwise. I would not want the press to have too little protection, either.

The problem is that the press has become—and maybe always was—a partisan actor here, and the protection afforded the press therefore gives the side it usually defends (these days, the left) an enormous advantage over the other side. In recent years, so many people have come to distrust the veracity and intentions of the press that they increasingly disregard what it writes as being slanted and misleading and often simply false. Perhaps that’s the proper correction for the whole problem, rather than the courts’ drawing more rigid standards to which the press must adhere. It does not bode well for the country when the press cannot be trusted, but the press has richly earned that judgment from the public.

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The NY Times claims it made an “honest mistake” about Palin

neo — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 18:10:29 +0000

Sarah Palin has sued the NY Times for defamation based on an editorial in the paper shortly after the Scalise shooting. In it, the Times had made this false claim:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

It was false in two ways. The first was that, in the Giffords shooting, there actually was no link to political incitement at all. This has been known for many years, and anyone familiar with the story ought to have been well aware of it.

The second is that Palin’s PAC had not published a map that fit that description; the cross-hairs were on the districts, not the people (the actual map can be found here).

The Times’ later “correction” of the story—published after a large public hue and cry had ensued—corrected the second fact but not the first, which was no longer stated so overtly but was nevertheless still implied as a possibility. Here is the correction:

Was this attack [the Scalise shooting] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.

The standard of proof for defamation in a lawsuit against a newspaper, [clarification/correction added: or against anyone else, in a suit brought by a public figure, is higher than if it were brought by a citizen]. It is necessary to prove “actual malice,” but that doesn’t mean what people often think it means. It’s not required that one have a recording of the Times editors saying that they hate Palin’s guts. A showing that they published their editorial with “reckless disregard” for its truth or falsehood would suffice.

Now it is being reported in the NY Post that the Times’ lawyer has made the following claim in the newspaper’s defense:

“There was an honest mistake in posting the editorial,” lawyer David Schultz told Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff…

On Friday, Palin’s lawyers argued that the Times knew the story was false.

“It was literally acknowledged the same day in another story in their paper,” said Kenneth Turkel.

Which brings us to my question: if the Times (or any other newspaper) claims it made an “honest mistake” in a story, shouldn’t its mistake be based on—you know—-something? Or can it be an honest mistake to just make s*** up?

If I had made the same statement about Palin the day after that Times editorial, and she had sued me for defamation, I might cite the Times as the authority on which I mistakenly had made my claim. But what authority can the Times cite? Its own editorial, in circular fashion?

Or perhaps Kathy Griffin, who tweeted in January of 2011, shortly after the Giffords shooting: “Watching the news? Congresswoman in AZ,who is ON Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map was SHOT in the head 2day. Happy now Sarah?”

I doubt that’s the authority on which the Times wishes to rely at this point. But beggars can’t always be choosers.

The sort of connection cited by Griffin was corrected time and again over the years in MSM stories across the land, including those in the Times itself. Even the Times’ fellow the WaPo pointed out the following, in a recent article about the Times editorial:

[Loughner’s] focus on Giffords began as early as 2007, long before the map was published. He became fixated on her since he met her at a constituent event in 2007, and decided he was unsatisfied by her answer to his question: “If words could not be understood, then what does government mean?”

Three days after the shooting, authorities filed criminal charges against Loughner after finding items in his home that showed he had plotted her assassination. They found in his safe a 2007 letter from Giffords thanking him for attending the constituent event, and an envelope stating “I planned ahead,” and the words “assassination” and “Giffords,” along with his signature.

Loughner had no clear political views. Instead, he was a troubled man who abused alcohol and drugs, and whose mental illness was apparent to his classmates and family even before he was diagnosed as schizophrenic during his court trial.

The Times wants the protection from constant defamation suits that is afforded by current law, based on the landmark 1964 case New York Times Co. v Sullivan that established the high standard of proof necessary to win such a suit [clarification/correction added: by a public figure]] against a newspaper. But aren’t newspapers supposed to meet some minimal standards of due diligence before publishing something? How low can that standard go?

In other words, for a mistake by a newspaper to be “honest,” must the paper not make some small effort to ascertain the truth? Is it not assumed to know the basic facts of something that’s been in the news for many years? And recall, this wasn’t an error by some cub reporter, it was by the full editorial board of the Times. And even after it published its correction—with all the benefits of hindsight and much published criticism in other media—it wasn’t all that much of a correction.

The Times’ motto has long been “All the news that’s fit to print.” This was neither news, nor fit to print. But after all, the Times never said “Only the news that’s fit to print.”

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Sarah Palin sues the NY Times…

neo — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 20:05:01 +0000

…for defamation:

Former Governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is suing the New York Times for defamation over a recent editorial tying one of her political action committee ads to a 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded Arizona Democrat Gabby Giffords and killed six people, including a 9-year-old girl”‹, The Post has learned”‹.

The Manhattan federal court lawsuit, filed Tuesday by lawyers Kenneth Turkel, Shane Vogt and S. Preston Ricardo, accuse”‹s”‹ the Gray Lady of having “violated the law and its own policies” when it accused her ”” in a “fabricated story” ”” of inciting the 2011 attack by Jared Lee Loughner.

The Times editorial that can be easily found appears to be the corrected version rather than the original. The relevant portion of the corrected version reads this way:

Was this attack [the Scalise shooting] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.

But if no connection to the Giffords shooting was ever established, then why mention Sarah Palin at all? Clearly, an equivalence is implied in the editorial between the overt and obvious political motivations of the Scalise shooting and the Giffords shooting (in which 6 people were actually killed, making it far worse in its consequences) despite the complete and utter lack of political motivations for Giffords’ shooter Loughner.

Bad as that is, the original Times editorial was much worse. It read [emphasis mine]:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Pretty pernicious stuff, and completely untrue. Readers will picture a graphic of the actual politicians, including Giffords, as being targets. But that was never the case and furthermore has long been known to have never been the case. And far from the link being “clear” between that “incitement” and the shooting, there was no link whatsoever, except as manufactured by the Times and other liberal outlets and pundits. The Times’ correction revises the specifics about the crosshairs, and takes away the reference to an explicit link between the PAC’s graphics and the Giffords shooting, but leaves the implication of a link untouched.

No wonder Palin is suing. But I don’t think she’ll win. Maybe she doesn’t expect to; maybe she just wants to highlight the devious duplicity of the Times. I don’t think the suit will succeed because the standards for defamation of a public figure are so very high, and this involves a PAC rather Palin herself anyway.

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Okay, here’s a little more analysis of Palin’s endorsement of Trump

neo — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 19:18:04 +0000

Yesterday I was being a bit cute when I wrote an entire post that went like this: “‘Palin endorses Trump’….well, naturally.”

Today I’m going to say a bit more about it, but only a bit more. It doesn’t interest me all that much, perhaps because that “naturally” is what I truly think. I wouldn’t have expected anything else, despite the fact that Trump’s opponent Cruz would be the person most in line with Palin in terms of conservative principles—at least, it would seem that way.

But just think about it. Palin has lost a lot of support from the rank and file right over the years. Her stint as a reality star, her increasing family chaos, but perhaps most of all her initial resignation from the governorship—all have taken a toll on her reputation for seriousness in the political realm. Despite that, she has many many die-hard supporters, and they are, for the most part, the very same people who support Trump.

Not all Trump-supporters are Palin-supporters, but I would guess that nearly all of Palin’s recent supporters are Trump-supporters. And in endorsing Trump she was not just playing to her own base, or even riding on the coattails of a popular media figure and he on hers. It’s that Palin was always a populist and Trump is a populist, and she’s supporting her fellow-populist. That’s their bond, and it’s a strong one.

Populism transcends political philosophy for both of them. Populism, and that “maverick-y” quality. Both enjoy saying things that shock and jar, and which their followers consider brave. Both have followers rather than supporters, although they have supporters too. Both thrive on celebrity. Cruz is too wonky and could never be considered a populist, and although he’s a maverick of sorts he’s a very controlled and cerebral maverick with a very different style. Palin could support him as senator, but in a national race that Trump had entered and was seeming to dominate, for Palin it was no contest.

Those of you who have read this blog for many years know that I’ve defended Palin from the start, despite the fact that she’s hardly my favorite politician and I’m never been a big fan. But you could look long and hard on this blog if you wanted to find criticism of her, much less a hit piece. And this post isn’t a hit piece either, although I completely disagree with Palin’s choice. But the choice doesn’t surprise me, and it makes sense for her, despite the fact that Trump goes against many of the conservative principles she espouses. For whatever reason, a lot of people who support Trump are able to ignore his liberal qualities because they think he will do One Big Thing, something no one else can do. It doesn’t even matter what that one thing is—for some, it’s ending immigration. For others, it’s ending PC speech. For still others, it’s causing the demise of the Republican Party (okay, maybe three big things). I’m not sure which is foremost for Palin, or maybe all three, but they are things she wants, and things she may believe Trump can do. At the very least, she wants to hitch her wagon to him, and maybe there’s something in it for her in the future.

I don’t happen to think Trump would accomplish any of those things if he were elected, and certainly not in the way his followers think he will or with the benefits they think will come. I’m not going to turn this post into one about Trump, though—do a search and you can find plenty of those on this blog (notice, though, that I’ve still resisted making a separate category for him, although I realize I should).

So in closing I’ll just repeat—Palin endorses Trump, naturally.

The post Okay, here’s a little more analysis of Palin’s endorsement of Trump appeared first on The New Neo.

So, what’s up with Sarah Palin?

neo — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 20:02:36 +0000

Long-time readers here know I’ve never joined the Palin-bashing. I’ve always thought she was pretty smart, and that most of the negative hype about her was exaggeration and/or outright lying, based not only on political animus but also on class snobbery and a profound cultural gap.

That said, I’ve always acknowledged that articulation and gravitas are not her strong suits. Ever since Palin quit the governorship of Alaska, she’s lost gravitas rather than gained it. I always figured that was her decision to make, and that she had pretty much left electoral office behind in favor of becoming a media personality, a gadfly, and backer of people in the Republican Party who agree with her conservative point of view. And that’s fine.

Lately there’s been a lot of muttering in the press about a recent statement of Palin’s that she’s thinking of running in 2016. There was an ambiguous and teasing quality to it, though; was she baiting the press?:

Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee, said she stood by comments she made Thursday in Las Vegas to ABC News, where she first expressed enthusiasm about potentially competing for the Republican presidential nomination.

“I am. As I said yesterday, I’m really interested in the opportunity to serve at some point,” Palin said Friday, as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a potential 2016 rival, looked on…

Palin said, “It is a significant step, of course, for anyone to publicly announce that they’re interested. Who wouldn’t be interested? Who wouldn’t be interested when they have been blessed with opportunities to speak about what is important to this country and for this country?”

Still, Palin said that she is not yet ramping up a national political operation. Instead, Palin said, she is contemplating her political future and does not feel rushed to make a final decision.

Sounds to me like she’s not running. I hope she’s not running, just as I hope Romney’s not running. There are plenty of new, fresh, conservative Republican faces with a proven track record and none of Palin’s baggage (same for Romney’s baggage). Yes, the new ones have their own baggage, and that baggage will be taken full advantage of by the MSM, of that you can be sure. But I’d much rather see someone like Scott Walker—who seems to have given a galvanizing speech at the Freedom Summit in Iowa—run. Walker is that rarity, a conservative Republican with a proven track record in a blue state, who’s been through the fire and shown true political grit.

Speaking of speeches and the Freedom Summit (although as I’ve said many times I don’t like to listen to political speeches and haven’t watched the Freedom Summit ones), apparently even Palin-supporters thought hers was pretty rambling and incoherent.

Did anyone here watch both Walker’s and Palin’s speeches? What did you think?

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