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If you're on Bluesky, you probably need little convincing that CBS is just gone. But even by those standards, this is an explosive charge. A journalist for what had arguably been the most rigorous broadcast news program in American history just said that the new network boss propagates plain lies.

I did.

The "thoughts and prayers" on the right are bullshit, of course. Gun availability is absolutely the reason the US murder rate is ten times higher than other industrialized countries. But the selective outrage and pearl clutching expressions of terror on the left are equally bullshit.

The media pays attention to mass shootings because its the only time middle class white people feel threatened by gun violence. We have a remarkable ability to ignore gun murders when the victims are poor and Black, and presumed to be a casualty of criminal conduct, regardless of other factors.

Three are dead. A child is wounded. It is horrifying. It is also rare. The rhetoric about how the country is tearing itself into pieces in self-slaughter or that you need to move to Europe to be safe is unhelpful. Murder is measured in events per 100,000. For most people, its events per million.

In case there are any questions remaining about the moral character of the supporters of AI data centers and their respect for democracy.

The White House Correspondents Dinner should end. At the very least, the president should be barred from entry, forcibly, forever more. He disgraced it permanently, as was utterly predictable. It was a forum of humiliation; for reporters, for the president and for the republic. It cannot be saved.

Actual journalism is not being replaced by artificial intelligence, because an AI can't reliably and credibly gather news. AI slop is distinguished from reporting by ... well, reporting. Interviews. Verifiable photographs of events. Perhaps that will change. Right now, I question if it can.

The question isn't whether Tamboli has a right to refuse service; Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado answered that. It isn't even whether his decision is correct. It is why he is in a position to have to consider refusing service to anyone at all. Nothing real justifies the deployment.

As a former soldier (and briefly, a National Guardsman), it's a tough call. The government should understand that the erosion of support for troops is a predictable facet of domestic deployment in service to a plainly political project, which is why it is so rarely done.

In #memphis, Tamboli's Pasta & Pizza is doing just fine, regardless of a call for a boycott by rightwing shitposters.

That's a QR code to my Signal account. The image from Friday night is now spreading through social media, connected to my identity. That should be enough to allow someone to act, I hope.

I honestly don't know.

This is me on Beale Street tonight in Memphis. The Memphis Safe Task Force isn't disclosing what they know about the Tyrin Johnson killing. Perhaps one of the National Guard will speak privately to me about what happened.

Seriously. The president is lying to you, straight up. I'm on Bluesky. I realize this is not an audience who credulously accepts anything Trump says. But it is incumbent on honest journalists to call a lie a lie when it is heard, if we are to retain credibility in the face of a Big Lie.

Are there dead voters on voter rolls? Absolutely. About 8,500 people die every day in the United States. 70 percent are registered voters. If it takes a week to take someone off the voter rolls, roughly 42,000 dead people are still registered to vote. There is no evidence of mass voter fraud here.

I will be quite interested in seeing who the Department of Homeland Security is going to list as an ineligible voter who is nonetheless enrolled somewhere. Because every time they try this, news reporters like me go knocking on doors to find those voters are usually alive and American citizens.

Instead, what we heard is the unfalsifiable claim that Maduro fixed VENEZUELAN elections in ways that are undetectable in a hand count. Which is entirely plausible and has nothing to do with uncentralized American elections where poll workers do not fear being disappeared if they raise a protest.

Start with this: he's had the 2020 ballots from Fulton County for almost six months. I have been told that FBI agents HAND COUNTED those ballots. If the hand count didn't match the result, we would have heard that.