Finally! Fox News is calling out a Supreme Court justice who took “eye-popping” gifts from a wealthy benefactor, and it’s well past time the conservative media outlet brought this to light. In addition to making a mockery of good-government best practices and casting a pall of suspicion over the Supreme Court and its decisions, lavish gifts and perks—especially when undisclosed—represent an egregious conflict of interest that erodes Americans’ faith in our judicial system. So step right up, Clarence Thomas, and take your medicine – – – oh, fuck. They’re talking about Ketanji Brown Jackson. Yes, it looks like Jackson accepted four concert tickets, valued at $3,700, from pop star Beyoncé, and then disclosed the gift as soon as she was required to do so. (Which, given the recent behavior of some of the conservatives on the court, is sort of “eye-popping” when you think about it.) Say, if Fox ever gets tired of “Ticketgate,” maybe they can do an exhaustive 12-part series on Justice Elena Kagan’s gifts—one for each bagel she turned down from her old high school friends. Because it’s only fair to treat the extracurricular activities of the liberals and slightly-less-liberals on the bench equally, without fear or favor. In a June 8 story on the Supreme Court justices’ gift disclosures, Fox News somehow managed to ignore Clarence Thomas’ belated disclosure of luxury trips accepted from billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow—and the $2.4 million in gifts he’s received since 2004, which were nearly 10 times more valuable than those of all other justices over that period combined—until the penultimate paragraph. Here is the lede from Fox News’ story: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was gifted four concert tickets by pop superstar Beyoncé valued at $3,700, according to a financial disclosure. The Biden appointee also disclosed a $900,000 advance for her upcoming memoir “Lovely One” out in September, and two gifts of artwork in her chambers worth $12,500. How dare she write a book?! It better be about her lavish trips to Thailand and an exclusive, all-male retreat in California, or Fox will surely taunt her a second time. Fox also called out Jackson’s previous financial disclosure, in which she “had a couple of eye-popping filings, including more than $6,500 in clothes from a photo shoot and a $1,200 flower display from Oprah Winfrey.” And here’s how the network dealt with the long-delayed disclosure from Thomas, who accepted gifts from an individual with a vested interest in Supreme Court decisions. (This “revelation” somehow didn’t show up until the seventh paragraph.) Justice Clarence Thomas also amended his 2019 filing to reveal two trips to Indonesia and Sonoma County, California, that he said were paid for by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow after they were “inadvertently omitted” initially. Of course, we’re talking about Fox News, which removed the “news” from its programming faster than Coca-Cola took the cocaine out of its sodas. But what about the rest of the media? Why are Democrats forced to ace every test, lest the public think they’re civilization-destroying chaos agents, while Republicans can be literal felons—who face dozens more felony charges—and still be treated as “normal” candidates? Why is President Joe Biden, who has fought a lifelong stutter, stoops a bit when he walks, and occasionally misspeaks or says something moderately silly, continually concern-trolled over his age and mental fitness by both Murdoch-owned and mainstream media outlets, even as the nearly 78-year-old Donald Trump spews utter nonsense on every imaginable and unimaginable subject? (Sharks and electric boats, anyone?) How can media outlets report with a straight face on the business activities of President Biden’s son Hunter, who’s never held a White House job, without also mentioning the $2 billion that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner took from Saudi Arabia after serving as a full-time presidential adviser and part-time bone saw-murder apologist? Why do the media obsess over every meaningless horse race poll while neglecting to mention that one of the horses should have been summarily disqualified for not being a horse at all, but rather a feral horse-murdering dingo with 34 felony convictions? Perhaps worst of all, why do media often give greater weight to Americans’ false perceptions about the temporary state of the economy (it’s doing great, in case you were wondering) than to convicted felon and coup-attempter Trump’s very real threats to the rule of law and our 248-year-old democracy? As Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker notes in the above tweets, the economy is going gangbusters right now—including with respect to real wages, despite the still-somewhat-elevated inflation numbers—and yet tens of millions of Americans remain clueless about its actual performance. Take this April analysis from Greg Ip, chief economics commentator at The Wall Street Journal. (Its reporters are still capable of doing good work if Murdoch isn’t standing over their shoulders dripping beads of sauna sweat on their keyboards.) Ip found a disconnect between the public’s perception of the economy and real-life economic conditions when it comes to measures ranging from inflation to stock market performance to employment growth. Citing a Wall Street Journal poll of swing state voters—74% of whom falsely claimed inflation had gone in the wrong direction over the previous year—Ip notes that “[w]hen it comes to the economy, the vibes are at war with the facts, and the vibes are winning.” [T]he gap between vibes and facts goes well beyond inflation, strongly suggesting choice of words isn’t the explanation. By 47% to 41%, more Journal poll respondents think their investments or retirement savings went in the wrong direction in the past year—a period in which the stock market roared to record highs, home values held steady or rose, and interest on savings went up. […] By more than 2-to-1 (56% to 25%), respondents said the economy had gotten worse rather than gotten better over the past two years. That is difficult to square with robust employment growth, unemployment near its lowest in half a century, or growth in gross domestic product, which actually accelerated last year. Even more telling was the respondents’ belief that their local economies were doing well but the national economy was a disaster. When asked, “Has the U.S. economy, or your state’s economy, gotten better or worse in the last two years?” respondents as a whole were deeply pessimistic about the national economy: More than twice of respondents answered “worse” than “better” on that question. But when asked about their states’ economies, they were far more sanguine, claiming (correctly, it turns out) by large margins that their local economies were doing better now than two years ago. So how to explain this? Well, for one thing, Republicans love to lie—and that presumably includes lying to pollsters. But that can’t be the entire explanation. People also tend to think Trump would be better than Biden on the economy, even though Biden has created more than 15 million jobs during his tenure and Trump created less than zero. Meanwhile, Democratic presidents have historically had much better economic records than Republican presidents—and by a jaw-dropping margin. (Hopium Chronicles’ Simon Rosenberg has been fond of pointing out that 33.8 million jobs were created during the 16 years when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were president, while a total of just 1.9 million were created over the 16 years of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.) In other words, far from being evenhanded and fair to both sides, much of the media have put their thumbs on the scale for fascism. Perhaps more stories about the real state of the economy and fewer interviews with diner-dwelling MAGA minions about the price of eggs and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s fondness for the music/witchcraft of Beyoncé would be welcome—if not for our sanity, then for the future of democracy itself. As veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour has said, it’s incumbent on the media to “be truthful, but not neutral.” That’s great and timely advice, of course, but at this point most of us would probably settle for “not intentionally dishonest.” Daily Kos’ Postcards to Swing States campaign is back, and I just signed up to help. Please join me! Let’s do this, patriots! Democracy won’t defend itself. Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “teflon Don” is no more?
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