Hasta La Gadget!

BRANCHBURG, N.J. ― Most of Rep. Leonard Lance’s fellow Republican lawmakers have chosen to avoid their constituents during this congressional recess. Lance, who represents New Jersey’s 7th District, made a different choice Wednesday night.

The congressman might have a better understanding of his colleagues’ thinking after enduring more than 90 minutes of hostile questioning from constituents. They were furious about President Donald Trump’s behavior and agenda ― and not very keen to hear their representative recite GOP talking points.

The capacity crowd at Raritan Valley Community College welcomed Lance with applause and sent him off with more at the end. That was about as good as it got for the five-term lawmaker.

“I never use the term yelling,” Lance told reporters afterward. “I thought it was vigorous.”

That it was, but there definitely was yelling. A lot of it.

This town hall lacked the kind of stand-out moment seen at other recent events, including a farmer handing Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) a bottle of antacid, a constituent telling Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that her cancer-stricken daughter could die if the Affordable Care Act were repealed, or vitriol on a multitude of topics being heaped on Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

But Lance, who comfortably secured re-election last year in a district that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won by a slender margin over Trump, didn’t have any easy night. He remained affable, even genteel, as the crowd jeered, booed and interrupted his responses to questions randomly chosen from numbered slips of paper.

I hope it was useful to the constituents.
Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.)

Lance attempted to explain his party’s repeal-and-replace strategy for the Affordable Care Act, promising the currently nonexistent “replacement” would guarantee coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, ensure young adults could remain on their parents’ policies until age 26 and prohibit insurers from establishing lifetime limits of benefits.

“Sounds like Obamacare!”

Then Lance called for Planned Parenthood to spin off its abortion services into a separate organization to avoid federal funding cuts.

“That’s silly!”

One constituent wanted Lance to push for investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia and the country’s interference with the presidential election, and demanded to know whether the congressman would support impeachment if evidence emerged that Trump’s campaign worked with the Russians. “I am a lawyer by trade and I certainly don’t want to prejudice ―” Lance began. He didn’t get to finish.

“Then investigate!”

Continuing, Lance assured his constituents, “I want you to know that I am very suspicious of the Russian government.”

“Your president isn’t!”

Even mundane praise for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sparked an angry response. “I think Speaker Ryan is a very fine individual,” Lance said. “I think he’s a person of great integrity. And I am proud that he is speaker of the House of Representatives.” Choruses of boos punctuated each sentence.

A man in the auditorium’s mezzanine called down to ask Lance if he opposed Trump’s “dopey” wall on the Mexican border. Lance meandered through a reply that included saying he opposed walling off the entire border and thought Trump’s plan was too expensive.

“Answer the question! It’s easy. Yes or no!”

He’s not speaking out against Donald Trump’s excesses and corruption.
Jennifer Robinson, Tewksbury Area Indivisible

One man questioned why Lance opposes a proposed natural gas pipeline in New Jersey but supports the oil-carrying Keystone XL Pipeline and Dakota Access Pipeline.

“Hypocrite!”

Another questioner raised Trump’s business conflicts of interest and his failure to release his tax returns. “President Trump should turn his tax returns over to the public. I urge him to do so,” Lance said.

That wasn’t good enough for the questioner, who demanded to know if Lance supports the effort by Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) to instruct Trump to hand over his tax records to the House Ways and Means Committee for a review.

“I don’t believe the Ways and Means Committee should be investigating the returns of private individuals,” Lance said. This really set off the crowd.

“He’s the president!”

As the evening wound down the final question, a woman pressed Lance on Trump’s erratic behavior, his penchant for lies and his attacks on federal intelligence agencies and the press. Lance’s response provoked the angriest reaction of the night.

“I believe that when the president misstates ―”

“Lies! He lies!”

“Push back! Push back! Push back!”

“We need someone who will fight for us!”

Huddling with local and national reporters immediately afterward, Lance showed little sign that the berating had taken a toll, and insisted he was glad to meet with people in his district.

“We were always going to have town hall meetings in person this year,” Lance said. He has another one planned at the same location Saturday morning.

Lance attributed most of the hostility to voters who supported Clinton in the election, but he didn’t parrot the suddenly popular GOP line that the protests were manufactured.

“Those in the audience were constituents. I don’t think they were paid. I think they came here in a manner of public-spiritedness,” he said. “I hope it was useful to the constituents. I know it was useful to me.”

Outside the auditorium, two residents of nearby Tewksbury Township said they didn’t find their congressman’s contributions to the dialogue or his stance toward Trump to be very useful.

“He made it through the evening. That’s about it,” said Susan Becker, who attended the town hall with other members of the newly formed Tewksbury Area Indivisible. The group, which is made up of about 20 locals, is affiliated with the loosely organized national Indivisible movement founded to oppose Trump’s agenda.

Jennifer Robinson, who leads the group, said she wasn’t satisfied by Lance’s words or his actions to date.

“He’s not protecting us,” she said. “He’s not speaking out against Donald Trump’s excesses and corruption and he’s not calling for independent investigation.”

These novice activists instead found satisfaction helping their neighbors organize and put pressure on their elected representatives.

“People are awake,” Robinson said. “Every day a new organization pops up here and here and here, and they’re connecting.”

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Let’s give it up for truth. C’mon, a nice hand. It gave us a lot of good years. Back in the day, Truth began with a capital T, and it came straight from God. Then science had a long run with it. The Enlightenment. Good times. But modernity was no piece of cake for truth. All that everything-is-relative business was shattering. As for post-modernity, let’s just say that everything-is-politics hasn’t been pretty, either. In a few thousand years we’ve gone from Truth, to truth, to your truth and my truth, and now to the so-called truth, when everything is entertainment and the capital T goes on Twitter. No wonder truth is taking the buyout. Let’s wish it all the best.

Last week, old school truth had its last hurrah – three hurrahs, actually: one in the East Room, one at Fox and one on Facebook. Each was prompted by an existential threat to truth, and all were ultimately about attention.

At the White House, the event was President Trump’s 117-minute news conference. It was irresistible theater with the press providing the conflict, the technology feeding the spectacle to our screens and the infotainment industry monetizing our eyeballs.

At 20th Century Fox, the event was the viral marketing campaign for “A Cure for Wellness,” a movie about a fake cure that the studio promoted by faking a fake news controversy, which became a real controversy when real news hammered the campaign as an assault on journalism.

On Facebook, the event was the release of “Building Global Community,” a 5,800-word open letter from Mark Zuckerberg about the responsibility of one of the planet’s largest publishers for distributing and profiting from sensational, delicious, dangerously polarizing and totally fabricated stories.

At his news conference, Trump stated yet again that his 304 Electoral College tally was the biggest win since Ronald Reagan. The reporters, many of whom had had it up to here with Trump’s factual negligence, were determined to answer his attack on the media by challenging his credibility. That’s what NBC’s Peter Alexander did when he respectfully ripped the president a new one. He reeled off the 365 electoral votes that Obama got in 2008, and the 332 in 2012, and he mentioned the 426 that George H.W. Bush got in 1988. “Why should Americans trust you when you have accused the information they receive of being fake,” Alexander asked, “when you’re providing information that’s fake?”

I would have loved it if Alexander had triggered a Perry Mason turn from Trump: “I admit it! I killed the truth! It had it coming!” If Alexander wasn’t expecting that, perhaps he anticipated that the notoriously thin-skinned president would lash out, which he did but not until the next day, when he tweeted that the “FAKE NEWS media” – he identified them as the New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS and CNN – “is the enemy of the American People!”

What Alexander got from Trump in the East Room was this: “Well, I don’t know. I was given that information. I was given – actually, I’ve seen that information around.”

Throwing his staff under the bus, Trump brushed off his credibility problem by taking his own accountability off the table. You can’t call him a liar for trusting those “best people” he’s surrounded himself with. Worse, with five words Trump put the journalistic norms of verification and attribution in play. “I’ve seen that information around” amount to, “It must be true – I saw it on the Internet.” It also means, “Believe me.” Forget the assessment of evidence; forget weighing the independence and the track record of sources. For Trump, extreme vetting of information consists of watching Hannity and O’Reilly, reading Breitbart and InfoWars and basking in the buzz in the Mar-a-Lago dining room.

In that world, the old sorting categories are toast. Instead of true and false, there’s true and alt-true; there’s facts and (in Kellyanne Conway’s creepy coinage) alternate facts. Fox News is good news; bad news is fake news. Trump knows that the currency of news isn’t accuracy – it’s attention. The more he tweets, the more the echo chamber uncritically amplifies him, and the more unearned gravitas his falsehoods acquire. Virality is the new veracity.

Which takes us to the Fox lot. The studio that marketed “A Cure for Wellness” by manufacturing fake fake news – you read that right – is part of the same corporation responsible for Fox News’s “fair and balanced” fakery. (If this kinship is a coincidence, randomness has a droll sense of humor.) The movie’s social media strategy was to disguise ads for the film as editorial content and post them on fabricated websites with names like the New York Morning Post and the Houston Leader.

Their scam was inspired by other scammers like the Macedonian teenagers who created NewYorkTimesPolitics.com and USAPolitics.co to propagate fake stories like “Clinton Indicted” as aggregation bait for alt-right sites, as link bait for the Facebook pages of Hillary haters and as a cash cow courtesy of Google’s AdSense. Talk about meta: The movie’s fake news sites carried fake stories like “Trump Orders CDC to Remove all Vaccination Related Information from Website,” which included real Trump tweets drawing a fake connection between vaccinations and autism.

The New York Times – “enemy of the American People” – ran two big negative stories within two days about the Fox campaign, which was yanked. But the idea that Facebook is a breeding ground for untruths was a motive for Zuckerberg, leapfrogging over Twitter’s dithering on the issue, to address a problem increasingly faced by its users: With universal access to unlimited content, how can you tell what’s true?

Most of us inhabit filter bubbles. Generally we consume news whose framing and viewpoints we believe to be fair. At the same time, we’re suckers for sensationalism; stories arousing emotions like fear and disgust are great at grabbing our attention. But democracy is strongest and community is most robust when we’re exposed to quality information from a variety of different perspectives. To protect its users, should Facebook more aggressively screen out fake news? If “Pope Endorses Trump” gets banned, why shouldn’t “Trump’s Margin Biggest Since Reagan”? Even when a story is accurate, showing someone an article whose perspective is opposite their own only makes them dig their heels in deeper. Should Facebook push back against polarization?

Zuckerberg answers these questions not by calling for new codes of conduct, but by promising new software code. In a world of inconceivable diversity, algorithms are more practical than ethics. Let the platform’s news feed show you a range of perspectives, not just the poles, so you can see where you fit on the spectrum. When stories spread, couple them with what fact-checking sites say about them, so text carries a context along with content. Let the analytics discover which stories are most shared without being read, most driven by attention-hijacking headlines; see if the data point to publishers who are gaming the system; and nail them.

None of this affects Facebook’s raid on the struggling news business’s bottom line. But what appeals to me about this approach is its reliance on intelligence more than on morality. Ever since Truth became truths, people have been searching for common values that don’t depend on divine authority. “The best life is not the moral life, but the life based on the use of reason”: that’s Israel Drazin’s gloss on Moses Maimonides. Give truth a gold watch for its long service to civilization, but don’t leave the adjudicator position vacant. Education, media literacy, critical thinking, breadth of sources, caliber of intelligence, quality of craft – there’s no shortcut to information you can rely on.

Thinking is hard. Truth is complicated. Focus is fragile. No question: Tweets are superb at stealing our attention. But no accident that birdbrain is not a compliment.

This is a cross-post of my cover piece in the Jewish Journal, where you can reach me if you’d like at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

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President Donald Trump likely won’t be watching the Academy Awards on Sunday night because, duh.

But we’ll let White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer share the official reason why:

I think Hollywood is known for being rather far to the left in its opinions, and I’ve got to be honest with you, I think the president will be hosting the Governors’ Ball that night. Mrs. Trump looks forward to putting on a phenomenal event. And the first lady’s put a lot of time into this event, in welcoming our nation’s governors to the capital, and I have a feeling that’s where the president and first lady are going to be focused on Sunday night.

The former reality star has fired up feuds with the likes of Meryl Streep (who’s nominated) and has also gotten roasted at previous award shows, so he probably isn’t feeling chummy with show business right about now. Plus, given the anti-administration yuks that will likely spill forth at the Oscars, perhaps Trump wants to spare his ego.

While he may not tune in, we have a sneaking suspicion that the commander-in-chief won’t tune out what transpires on Oscar night. Got that, Twitter?

He apparently hasn’t been such a fan of the ceremony anyway, tweeting in 2014 that it was “amateur night” and “bullshit.” In 2015, he issued this politicized critique: 

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Amazon’s recently unveiled brick-and-mortar grocery store, Amazon Go, not just sell food, it’s going to sell booze too. Okay, now I’m all for this. This convenience store, currently running as a test in Seattle, wants to revolutionize the old corner shop by eliminating human cashiers almost entirely.

The store is designed to charge customers automatically as they take items off the shelves and leave the store. You are automatically charged for the items via an app, which is scanned on your phone when you enter the store. That means no standing in lines, which everyone should love. Machine learning, sensors, and cameras are gunning to take our jobs. Yay!

However, now that Amazon has confirmed that the store in Seattle will also sell alcoholic beverages, this will require a human to be present to check IDs. That is going to be one lonely cashier.

[via Recode via Slashgear]

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