According to the National Registry of Exonerations in the United States, 27% of those on the registry who were accused of homicide, but were later exonerated, gave false confessions. However, 81% of people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities also confessed when accused of homicide.

Can you cite a source on that?

With a bunch of time spent digging around in old Internet archives maybe.

they admitted they did it because they wanted to discredit Bush.

He sounds trustworthy so I guess we’ll take that at face value

schiff is as far left as the majority of this country is willing to go

He’s not even the most left leaning in his city. LA has four different DSA city councilors

Rather used documents that turned out to be false.

Rather used copies of real documents that had their kerning adjusted to appear false.

you’re omitting a hugely important piece of those events.

It was a strategic ratfuck by the administration and one Karl Rove was celebrated for in the White House.

But CBS execs went along with it, because they were more concerned with next quarter’s ad revenue than their broader reputation or their duty to the public as a broadcaster.

Twenty years later, the company has been fully picked apart. Their best journalists are gone and replaced with hacks. They’ve fully lost the youth audience and the public trust. The Ellisons are picking the last meat off the bones.

is there any clearer sign of what’s happening than some of the most prominent left leaning members of the “opposition” party posting their concerns on a right-wing platform?

Adam Schiff is “left leaning” in the same way that Elon Musk is a socialist.

But yes, it is abundantly clear that the Ellisons are buying out Sumner Redstone and the Viacom shareholders in order to impose a more modern Silicon Valley tech sector politics on a network that’s long been a thorn in the side of the Republican Party. Just like when Murdoch bought up National Geographic and the Moonies took control of the Washington Times and Bezos seized the Washington Post. Hell, just like when William Randolph Hearst bought up the San Fransisco Examiner and the New York Journal.

only a matter of time …

Back under the Bush Admin, Phil Donahue got axed for opposing the Iraq War and Dan Rather was forced out at CBS for revealing Bush’s embarrassing Texas air national guard service. Or just the massive exodus of professional journalists following media consolidation during the 80s and 90s.

We’ve always been living in this moment. Now we’re just at the point where a late night comedian is the last vestige of broadcast media still critical of a sitting President.

Just look at the list of journalists shit-canned in 2024 alone.

This wave of journalism layoffs shows no signs of receding. Since we first published this list, The Intercept, Vice, BDG, WAMU, Engadget, NowThis, and Law360 have let more than a hundred media workers go. With the help of former staff at each, we’ve managed to gather 119 new names. We also heard from many readers that we’d been too conservative in placing the start date of this wave on January 1. The pre-holiday cuts at Wired, The New Yorker, PopSugar, The Washington Post (where former employees hastened to point out that they’d taken buyouts rather than suffering layoffs), Vox, Vice (in a separate wave from this latest one), and Popular Science were too brutal to ignore. So we’ve moved the start date of this list back to November 1 — which is closer to right but is, nevertheless, somewhat arbitrary, given how often media layoff waves tend to crash.

Since we first published, we’ve added more than 250 new names to the list of 354 we had before. We’re under no illusions that this represents everyone affected by mass layoffs in media.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-donald-trumps-net-worth-2014-2024/

My man is at the beating heart of an absolute octopus of scams and flim-flams. He’s making money hand-over-fist and will likely leave office several times wealthier than at any point in his life prior to the second term.

So much of this wealth is rooted in his ability to access near-infinite credit, to lose billions of dollars, to declare bankruptcy, and to start over again with fresh new lines of borrowing capacity. He can do this, seemingly forever, because he’s such a well-known and well-insulated conduit for dirty money. If you need to bypass US sanctions or move liquidity through the NATO-aligned banking system, you’ve got a fence who can turn over god only knows how much money without being bothered by federal investigators.

He’s been doing this since he took over the business from his father, who was deeply embedded with the east coast mafia families and their corrupt government counterparts. It’s the reason he’s so close with Rudy Guliani (who made his career at the SDNY by shielding one half of the mafia in order to prosecute the other half).

If not for the licensing and the apprentice

Tip of the iceberg. He’s got friends at every major financial sector on the Atlantic. My guy has likely laundered trillions in his lifetime.

You can’t tell me that many voters only voted for the President and ignored all the other Republican candidates.

If you actually interview the voters themselves, its very easy to see why they loved Trump and hated the rest of the party. Like, their social media routinely says as much. Their favorite news and entertainment channels say as much. They say as much. This is a cult of personality, not unlike with Reagan in '80/'84 or Nixon in '72, where split-tickets and blank bottom ballots swept both Republican Presidents and Dem House Majorities into power.

Besides all the legal voter suppression there was likely some tabulation machine manipulation.

Oh absolutely. But that’s been fucking liberals over since Operation Eagle Eye. Democrats simply don’t seem to care. From Michelle Obama to Stacey Abrams to Pete Buttigieg, when they’re asked what they can do to resist voters disenfranchisement, the answer is always “Vote Harder”.

The “when they go low, we go high” strategy appears to be little more than wishful thinking, as democrats chant “demographics is destiny” in states where more and more of the residents are cut off from the elections process.

George Washington would be super happy to see what we’ve become.

Washington was the wealthiest man in America at the time of his death. He might abhor the low rent crassness of this particular iteration of benediction. But I don’t think he’d mind the 250 years of dogmatic ass-kissing that brought us to this moment.

Dude would be quite happy to hear his face is on money and his name is branded into the country he helped plunder, from sea to shining sea.

Nah dude he famously was bankrupted again like 2 or 3 times.

When you’ve got an unlimited line of credit, bankruptcy is just a way to discharge old debts.

There’s a story his daughter likes to tell of Trump and Ivanka driving through Manhattan in a limosine on the way to a luxury gala. Trump points out the window to a starving homeless man and says “He’s $800M richer than I am”, then rolls up the window and drives on.

That’s what bankruptcy means to a billionaire. It’s got nothing to do with material conditions. Just a way of keeping score.

They also educate and inform people.

Eh. They are increasingly polluted by their private sponsors and corporate partners. I’ve given up on listening to NPR in the mornings because so much of it is very obviously native advertisement or propaganda (particularly bad in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7th, with broadcasters uncritically repeating IDF hoaxes like the “40 decapitated babies” line).

So America they’ve taken your medicade, they’ve taken the ability of a good portion of your country to be able to eat, they’re taking immigrants, tourists, or people that they don’t agree with to camps, they’re taking your education, they’re taxing you with tariffs, they have a gestapo, and they’ll be taking away more rights from Women and POC. I have to ask…how much longer until you start to get a little bit violent?

I got a “Blue Alert” on my phone not two days ago, thanks to a vigilante attacking an ICE agent. Dozens of armed cops were all over the Mayor’s Office yesterday because of a rumor of a Palestinian protest that never materialized. FFS, three different people tried to shoot the President in a two month span.

I don’t think the problem is a lack of violence. What Americans largely lack is coordination and institutional support. A thousand little lone wolves don’t a revolution make.

Only around 15% of the PBS budget comes from the federal treasury via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), thanks to decades of privatization. NPR’s budget is as little as 1% from the CBP.

Consequently, both networks have suffered from a creeping enshittification, with a rising tide of advertisement and ad-supported content taking over both networks and the forced sale of some of its most valuable assets (PBS licensing Sesame Street to Warner Brothers, for instance) to finance continued operations.

Like, by all means. Cancel your Netflix. Cancel Disney. Support public broadcasting. But this isn’t a solution in the long term, any more than cancelling Basic Cable for Netflix was a way to fix the fully privatized entertainment system. We’re still surrendering our social capital to private interests, bit by bit (or in this case by massive chunk).

This is a stab wound. We can patch it, but we shouldn’t mistake this as to anyone’s material benefit.

I honestly think that she should’ve won but the repubos cheated, as they do every time.

When Republicans cheat and win, Democrats stomp their feet but insist there’s nothing they can do.

When Republicans cheat and lose, Democrats say “demographics is destiny!” and ignore the problem until the next election cycle.

There’s no way Trump swept every single swing state.

Eh. Harris was a dogshit campaigner who inherited a dogshit campaign from a senile neoconservative hack with underwater approval numbers. Had Walz been at the top of the ticket (or Pritzker or Baldwin or maybe even Klobacher or Warren) things might have gone differently. Their political instincts were miles better than Harris’s, which is why they stomp all over her in the 2020 primary.

Civil fines that were almost certainly less than what he collected in kickbacks for managing the transactions.

And then, of course, he never lost his licenses or otherwise suffered long term financial or legal penalties.

Just around the riverbend.

We ain’t had “checks and balances” since Allen Dulles and Curtis Lemay had JFK and RFK killed.

I mean, the Truman-Era Red Scare / Eisenhower-Era “Operation Wetback” / “Operation Eagle Eye” weren’t exactly America’s finest hours, either.

And you only have to thumb through a few chapters from Hoover back to McKinley to notice a certain historical weight of Fascist tendency baked into the American bureaucracy post-Reconstruction Era.

Honestly, the more notable moments in US History are when “Checks and Balances” actually work. Like, Nixon actually leaving office before the Senate could impeach him was something of a high water mark for the country, precisely because it suggested these institutions functioned as advertised (eventually). Even Comey threatening to prosecute Hillary was something of a moment for the country, as it suggested a President’s Wife Turned Senator Turned Mega-Bundler Turned Presidential Nominee wasn’t impervious to the consequences of her shitty stupid decisions.

But then Ford pardons Nixon and Trump fires Comey and you have to come back down to Earth to reconsider whether this game is rigged from the start.

The last 12 years have taught me that there are simply to many fucking republicans.

So many that they’ve been bleeding into the Democratic Party.

Felt like I was taking crazy pills when Kamala Harris spent the back half of October leaving her very popular VP candidate on the side of the road while doing a whirlwind tour with… Liz fucking Cheney. Between that, importing all of Keir Starmer’s UK campaign staffers, and letting Michael Bloomberg manager her social media, it’s a wonder she didn’t do worse.

That wouldn’t be a problem but every single last one of them are worthless pieces of shit

Waking up every day and saying the Pledge of Allegiance on a pile of Ayn Rand novels will do that to you.

The Guardian. When news breaks, you can guarantee they’ll say something about it in five to fifteen years.

I suspect the AI is going to be more interested in your history with Delta (frequent flyer status) and the fanciness of your credit card than your zip code. Age, employment status, and race/gender/number of social connections will also likely factor in.

Great time to be in the “Influencer” business, but I wouldn’t want to be a member of a marginalized group (dark skin, poor English, scary religion/gender, etc).

the catch is that the vpn connects to the poorest areas of the country you live in

A common mistake.

The High Price of Being Poor

You’re going to get a worse deal if the airline thinks you’re not going to be a repeat customer or part of a larger network of frequent fliers. The customers who get the best deals are the ones that airlines believe they will be able to collect money from routinely. If they have you pegged as someone who will only ever buy a ticket once or twice in their lives, they’re going to try and sell you the worst possible seat at the highest possible price.

What you can expect as a poor buyer is debt-financing, bait-and-switch, and the worst kind of economy service at the highest marginal price point. Budget airline travel is miserable and AI isn’t going to make the experience any better.

Maybe you could run for something

Sadly, I don’t have any billionaires willing to put up seven digits to stack my campaign.

But hey, better luck with whatever slop the next election cycle feeds you, I guess.