3. Is Joy Reid leaving their party something Democrats view as ominous? I guess it could be if she represented an exodus of ignorant anti-Semites and bigots, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. “The Democratic Party is as married to this Israel over everything. Israel, no matter what, Israel, no matter what they do, no matter how many people they kill, the Democrats were as married to that as the Republicans. And so it would take a really strong Democrat. It would take a Mamdani-style event to get a Democrat to say that they weren’t getting down with that,” the ex-MSNBC anti-white racist announced during an interview on her podcast with pseudo-academic anti-white racist Ta-Nehisi Coates. This week she also said that “Nobody black I know is really excited about the 4th of July. It is the celebration of slaveholders who freed themselves from having to pay taxes to the Crown for their slave empire.”
That, of course, is “1619 Project” fake history. I’m pretty sure the GOP wouldn’t trade Tucker for Reid even if Democrats threw in cash and a player to be named later.
4. ElevenLabs‘ AI audiobook version of Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Odyssey,” coming the theaters in July, will feature the fake voice of Michael Caine. This roughly 13-hour verbal version of “The Odyssey” was released today through the company’s ElevenReader audiobook app. Yes, Caine, who is retired (finally) licensed his voice and image, so this is all legal and ethical as long as the marketing is clear that anyone who thinks they are paying for Michael Caine’s unique approach to the material and the use of his veteran dramatic instincts to enrich the material is being conned, or, in the alternative, is an idiot.
“The Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a state-funded scholarship program that awarded financial aid based on the race of college students. The Democrat-controlled court followed the precedent laid out by the United States Supreme Court in finding that Gov. Tony Evers and the state were violating the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Two of the most liberal justices, however, wrote a concurrence denouncing the bar on the use of race for such scholarships. If Democrats are able to pack the Supreme Court as demanded by many party leaders, this concurrence is an example of the likely changes that a packed court will bring in reversing anti-discrimination and other rulings.
“The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty represented the taxpayers in this successful challenge of the Wisconsin Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program. That program administered taxpayer-funded grants of up to $2,500 per academic year to eligible students of Black American, American Indian, Hispanic, or certain Southeast Asian backgrounds.
“The state paid out roughly half a million dollars in scholarships, now found to be racially discriminatory.
“Citing the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Court reaffirmed that “The Constitution requires that every person ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.’”
…Chief Justice Jill Karofsky and Susan Crawford, lamented the loss of racially discriminatory programs. In her concurrence, Chief Justice Karofsky captured the sweeping, open-ended rationales used for such programs:
“Why have we not learned from our past? Why are we not willing to recognize the harms this country has caused to those who are marginalized, disempowered, or disenfranchised? Why, instead of wielding the Equal Protection Clause as a sword against racism, do we employ it to shield against the promise of equality for all? The answer appears to be because we have failed to fully recognize how societal and governmental practices have long continued to enforce a preference for White Americans and to burden Black Americans and those of other disadvantaged races or backgrounds.”
Ethics Alarms 
4. “Watched my wedding video again the other day. Damned if Michael Caine wasn’t in it!”
— Dennis Miller
Joy Reid: how many times does a name need to be repeated and heard by a populace to react as if the name has some import?
We did.
There has been a civil rights movement since the 1860’s. The 14th Amendment was ratified at a time when an amendment to enshrine racial segregation and apartheid would have been very politically popular.
It was. Again, I rem ind readers
The 14th Amendment was used as a sword against this program.
While this particular program did not enforce a preference for White Americans, the precedents that required the Wisconsin Supreme Court to strike down this program had struck down actual preferences for White Americans.
2. Fake caller IDs are necessary in limited cases, such as a doctor’s cell phone spoofing his office’s number, or a local insurance agency spoofing the corporate customer service number for some outgoing calls. Using spoofing deceptively is indeed illegal. (which no doubt is the vast majority of its uses). Some numbers (like 1800-medicare) are able to prevent other’s from claiming they’re that number, but this kind of blocking is not based on a system that can scale.
Telemarketing law is roughly split along two chunks, the ‘Telemarketing Sales Rule’ regulations which are quite extensive, and only rarely enforced, and the ‘Telephone Consumer Protection Act’ rules. The latter are much more basic (essentially “do-not-call” record keeping rules) and give consumers the private right of action for enforcement.
Spoofing was previously thought to only fall under TSR, so only enforceable by government agencies, but a certain well-known retired cop pro-se plaintiff discovered that the FTC promulgated rules about deceptive caller ID under the TCPA law prior to congress encoding the same into the TSR, so people can now claim up to $1500 damages per call for spoofed spam.
Phone consumers can’t sue CVS for the caller stating they’re with CVS though, that’s the hard part. I just signed onto my fourth lawsuit for illegal telemarketing today. In my experience It takes a minimum of 12 minutes and sometimes over an hour on the phone before you MIGHT identify the company paying for the spam. TSR rules require full company identification provided within the first few statements, but, again, it’s the government that (doesn’t) enforce that.