Thursday, February 09, 2023

A Content Rich Environment

So let's start with Rick Scott: And then Jonathan Turley and the Gym Jordan joint: Let's go to the tape!
"Mr. Turley, turning to, you have you ever worked for Twitter?" asked Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL). 
"No," he answered. 
"Do you have any formal relationship with the company?" she asked. 
"No," he confessed. "I just have an account." 
"Do you have any specific or special or unique knowledge about the inner workings of Twitter?" she asked. 
"Nothing beyond the Twitter Files and what I read in the media," he admitted. 
The so-called "Twitter Files" are carefully curated details released occasionally by Elon Musk to support his complaints about the company prior to his takeover. He has never released all of the files for the public to see. 
"So, essentially, your responses to the questions here today were your own opinion and pure conjecture?" Wasserman-Schultz asked Turley. 
He disagreed saying that he would base his knowledge on what he read. 
"You said you don't have any specific or unique knowledge of Twitter, but you spoke as if you did," she said. "You were asked very specific questions about Twitter -- the way Twitter functions and the decision-making that they make. Yet, you don't have any unique or special knowledge about Twitter. Never worked for them. This is only your opinion, would you say, as a Twitter account user?" 
He said that his analysis was about information in the "public domain." 
"Legal analysis is another word for opinion," she cut in. 
Turley admitted it was a fair assessment. He said that he's read 20 of the millions of emails, slack conversations and internal communications at Twitter over the past several years.
So, yeah, this is a fair summation. So is this: Once again the concept of evidence eludes the Republicans. They seem to think just saying things from a witness chair makes it so; or that the only audience they need is already on Twitter.

And I don’t think Biden and the House Democrats are lucky in their enemies (Susan Glasser’s “fair and balanced” assessment of Biden’s SOTU.). I think the Democrats are the only adults in the room, and the country is fortunate the GOP doesn’t control both houses of Congress and the White House.

Because Republicans really don’t know how to govern; and they really don’t care.
Meanwhile, new Republican-led oversight hearings – including one on Wednesday apparently designed to prove that some combination of Twitter, the FBI and Biden stole the 2020 election – have further erased the line between conservative opinion TV and governance. The all-day session featured the kind of histrionic questioning and grandstanding, which verged on bullying of the witnesses, that delights the GOP’s base and runs on a loop on right-wing media. But if anything, it undermined the premise that a massive media, deep-state swamp conspired against Trump as witnesses testified that there was no order from the FBI to temporarily suppress a New York Post story about a laptop purportedly belonging to the president’s son, Hunter. Another House hearing on Thursday, the first of a series into the alleged “weaponization” of the government against conservatives, will again fuel an impression the GOP is trying to build scandals from right-wing talking points.
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