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Washington County voters offer varying opinions on the Donald Trump indictment process

Updated: 6:27 PM EDT Mar 21, 2023

Donald Trump enjoyed strong support in Washington County during the 2020 presidential election, winning 60 percent of the vote over President Joe Biden.As he awaits his fate over a grand jury investigation that could lead to an indictment over altered payout documents, some of those same Washington County voters express their opinions about the process.Republican Party chairman for Washington County, Sean Logue, says the process is mishandled."This is unprecedented. This is unheard of," Logue said. At issue is whether Trump altered documents while in the White House to cover up payments to his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who admitted to paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels as "hush money," on behalf of Trump, following an affair between the two.This is said to have happened in New York, before the 2016 presidential election."They're somehow going to go back seven years and use some kind of state charge against him on a federal election matter? That makes absolutely no sense. I'm a lawyer and I can't understand it," Logue said.Todays top headlines: Police: Woman assaulted and robbed inside Westmoreland County apartment building elevator Woman found dead on Route 119 in Westmoreland County Woman facing homicide charges in Butler County shootingOther voters in Washington County offer varying opinions."It gives you the impression that it might be a witch hunt sort of speak, but no one is above the law," says David Young, a registered Republican."I was always for Trump. He was my choice," said Myrna Adams, another Republican. "I think it's just a political thing like a witch hunt. This was years ago that this happened. When it comes time for the primaries, why is it all of a sudden a big issue? But independent voter Amber Jellots says Trump is rightfully targeted in the investigation."I think it's completely fair. I think he skirted the law the whole four years he was in office, and multiple years before that. this is accountability, the same accountability they wanted for Hillary Clinton," Jellots said.

Donald Trump enjoyed strong support in Washington County during the 2020 presidential election, winning 60 percent of the vote over President Joe Biden.

As he awaits his fate over a grand jury investigation that could lead to an indictment over altered payout documents, some of those same Washington County voters express their opinions about the process.

Republican Party chairman for Washington County, Sean Logue, says the process is mishandled.

"This is unprecedented. This is unheard of," Logue said.

At issue is whether Trump altered documents while in the White House to cover up payments to his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who admitted to paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels as "hush money," on behalf of Trump, following an affair between the two.

This is said to have happened in New York, before the 2016 presidential election.

"They're somehow going to go back seven years and use some kind of state charge against him on a federal election matter? That makes absolutely no sense. I'm a lawyer and I can't understand it," Logue said.

Todays top headlines:

Other voters in Washington County offer varying opinions.

"It gives you the impression that it might be a witch hunt sort of speak, but no one is above the law," says David Young, a registered Republican.

"I was always for Trump. He was my choice," said Myrna Adams, another Republican. "I think it's just a political thing like a witch hunt. This was years ago that this happened. When it comes time for the primaries, why is it all of a sudden a big issue?

But independent voter Amber Jellots says Trump is rightfully targeted in the investigation.

"I think it's completely fair. I think he skirted the law the whole four years he was in office, and multiple years before that. this is accountability, the same accountability they wanted for Hillary Clinton," Jellots said.

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Mismatches in conceptual definitions of basic thingseven animalshelp explain why people end up talking past each other so often, according to new research.

Is a dog more similar to a chicken or an eagle? Is a penguin noisy? Is a whale friendly?

Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley say these absurd-sounding questions might help us better understand whats at the heart of some of societys most vexing arguments.

The research in the journal Open Mind shows that our concepts about and associations with even the most basic words vary widely. At the same time, people tend to significantly overestimate how many others hold the same conceptual beliefsthe mental groupings we create as shortcuts for understanding similar objects, words, or events.

Its a mismatch that researchers say gets at the heart of the most heated debates, from the courtroom to the dinner table.

The results offer an explanation for why people talk past each other, says Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the studys principal investigator.

Simple questions like, What do you mean? can go a long way in preventing a dispute from going off the rails, Kidd says. In other words, she says, Just hash it out.

Disagreements about word meanings arent new. From interpretations of the Constitution to definitions about what a fact is, semantic disputes have long been at the center of legal, philosophical, and linguistic thinking. Cognitive psychologists have likewise studied these differences in how people perceive and describe the world. The accumulation of our lived experiences affects how we conceptualize the world and helps explain why two people approach problems in different waysor even agree if something is a problem in the first place.

But measuring just how much those concepts vary is a long-standing mystery.

To help understand it a bit better, Kidds team recruited more than 2,700 participants for a two-phase project. Participants in the first phase were divided in half and asked to make similarity judgements about whether one animala finch, for examplewas more similar to one of two other animals, like a whale or a penguin. The other half were asked to make similarity judgments about US politicians, including George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. The researchers chose those two categories because people are more likely to view common animals similarly; theyd have more shared concepts. Politicians, on the other hand, might generate more variability, since people have distinct political beliefs.

But they found significant variability in how people conceptualized even basic animals.

Take penguins. The probability that two people selected at random will share the same concept about penguins is around 12%, Kidd says. Thats because people are disagreeing about whether penguins are heavy, presumably because they havent lifted a penguin.

If peoples concepts are totally aligned, then all of those similarity judgments should be the same, Kidd says. If theres variability in those judgments, that tells us that theres something compositionally thats different.

The researchers also asked participants to guess what percentage of people would agree with their individual responses. Participants tended to believeoften incorrectlythat roughly two-thirds of the population would agree with them. In some examples, participants believed they were in the majority, even when essentially nobody else agreed with them.

Its a finding befitting of a society of people convinced theyre right, when theyre actually wrong.

Overall, two people picked at random during the study timeframe of 2019-2021 were just as likely to have agreed as disagreed with their answers. And, perhaps unsurprisingly in a polarized society, political words were far less likely to have a single meaningthere was more disagreementthan animal words.

People are not aware of that misalignment, Kidd says. People generally overestimate the degree to which other people will share the same concept as them when theyre speaking.

An exception? People were generally on the same page when it came to the word eagle.

In a second phase of the project, participants listed 10 single-word adjectives to describe the animals and the politicians. Participants then rated the animals and politicians featuresIs a finch smart? was an example of a question they were asked.

Again, researchers found that people differed radically in how they defined basic concepts, like about animals. Most agreed that seals are not feathered, but are slippery. However, they disagreed about whether seals are graceful. And while most people were in agreement that Trump is not humble and is rich, there was significant disagreement about whether he is interesting.

This research is significant, Kidd says, because it further shows how most people we meet will not have the exact same concept of ostensibly clear-cut things, like animals. Their concepts might actually be radically different from each other. The research transcends semantic arguments, too. It could help track how public perceptions of major public policies evolve over time and whether theres more alignment in concepts or less.

When people are disagreeing, it may not always be about what they think it is, Kidd says. It could be stemming from something as simple as their concepts not being aligned.

Source: Jason Pohl for UC Berkeley

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Mismatched definitions of basic stuff may explain disagreements - Futurity: Research News

NTSB: Deteriorating weather conditions present during takeoff of fatal Little Rock flight

{p}The preliminary report into the ongoing investigation of the failed takeoff of a small airplane from the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock last month was released Friday, March 17 and showed that "changing/deteriorating weather conditions from the time of taxi, takeoff, and the accident" were present. (Photo KATV){/p}

The preliminary report into the ongoing investigation of the failed takeoff of a small airplane from the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock last month was released Friday and showed that "changing/deteriorating weather conditions from the time of taxi, takeoff, and the accident" were present.

The commercial pilot and and all four passengers died when the Beech 200 airplane they were traveling in departed to Columbus, Ohio on Feb. 22. The five people were all employees of CTEH, a Little Rock-based environmental consulting firm.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, a video surveillance camera located near the site of the crash showed the airplane impacted the ground in a right-wing-low, nose down attitude. The NTSB said the video from the 3M plant also showed heavy rain and blowing debris near the impact area.

"Other than severe impact and thermal damage, no pre-impact airframe anomalies were identified," the report said. "Detailed examinations of the engines did not reveal any pre-impact anomalies."

Stated in the report, according to two weather reports taken before and after the planes takeoff, the wind gusts went from 27 knots to 40 knots.

It also said visibility went from ten statute miles to 2 statute miles

The report also noted that the aircraft was "about 300 pounds under its maximum gross takeoff weight at the time of takeoff."

The preliminary report into the ongoing investigation of the failed takeoff of a small airplane from the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock last month was released Friday, March 17 and showed that "changing/deteriorating weather conditions from the time of taxi, takeoff, and the accident" were present. (KATV){p}{/p}

The twin-engine plane piloted by Sean Sweeney carried Gunter Beaty, Kyle Bennett, Micah Kendrick, and Glenmarkus Walker as they were traveling to Ohio in response to an alloy plant explosion in the city of Bedford.

"We are incredibly saddened to report the loss of our Little Rock colleagues," Dr. Paul Nony, senior vice president of CTEH said after the crash. "We ask everyone to keep the families of those lost and the entire CTEH team in their thoughts and prayers."

Meteorologist James Bryant said the crash happened just as a line of showers were moving quickly east with strong winds out of the west northwest. Bryant said when the plane crashed at 12:02 p.m., Adams Field recorded a wind gust of 46 mph.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the crash and the NTSB will ultimately determine the ultimate cause which could take between 12 and 24 months to complete.

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NTSB: Deteriorating weather conditions present during takeoff of fatal Little Rock flight - KATV

Not many people know that 16 November 2022 was the day that freedom of speech died on the internet. This was the day the European Unions Digital Services Act (DSA) came into law. Under the DSA, very large online platforms (VLOPs) with more than 45million monthly active users like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram will have to swiftly remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. Or they will face fines of up to six per cent of their annual global revenue. Larger platforms must be DSA compliant by this summer, while smaller platforms will be obliged to tackle this content from 2024 onwards.

The ramifications of this are immense. Not only will the DSA now enforce the regulation of content on the internet for the first time, but it is also set to become a global standard, not just a European one.

In recent years, the EU has largely realised its ambition to become a global regulatory superpower. The EU can dictate how any company worldwide must behave if it wants to operate in Europe, the worlds second-largest market. As a result, its strict regulatory standards often end up being adopted worldwide by both firms and other regulators, in what is known as the Brussels effect. Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy law which came into force in May 2018. Among many other things, it requires individuals to give explicit consent before their data can be processed. These EU regulations have since become the global standard, and the same could now happen for the DSA.

The EUs enforcement of GDPR has been somewhat tentative. It has issued only about 1.7 billion in penalties since 2018, according to The Economist, which is peanuts in an industry that generates more than a trillion euros in revenue annually. But the EU seems to have learnt from this: the DSA has enormous enforcement capabilities built into it. The European Commission expects its internal industry watchdog to have over 100 full-time staff by 2024. Plus, contract workers and national experts will be expected to supervise Big Techs operations, too. It amounts to what EU internal-markets commissioner Thierry Breton calls a historic moment in digital regulation. The VLOPS are expected to fund this enforcement operation themselves, paying up to 0.05 per cent of their global annual turnover each year to the Commission.

This gives the EU an extraordinary amount of power. The regulation of the DSA will be overseen by the Commission itself, not an independent regulator. Whats more, the DSA includes a crisis-management mechanism, added last year in a last-minute amendment. The Commission argued it needs to be able to direct how platforms respond to events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently, in a crisis, the anticipatory or voluntary nature of obligations on tech companies to tackle disinformation would be insufficient. Under the DSA, the Commission has given itself the power to determine whether such a crisis exists, defined as an objective risk of serious prejudice to public security or public health in the Union. Given the EUs willingness to weaponise the rule of law against its ideological opponents, such as Poland and Hungary, the potential this gives the EU to abuse this mechanism is worrying indeed.

Not only does this give the EU immense powers for censorship, it also represents a profound technocratic evasion of democratic accountability. The unelected European Commission is forcing Big Tech to police the internet to rein in what the EU deems to be unacceptable speech or disinformation. In so doing, the Commission has empowered itself to impose its values on the rest of us. If this draconian censorship were being enforced by a national government, we would at least be able to vote it out. But this is an altogether different scenario.

Under the new law, the undemocratic European Commission has empowered itself to regulate content on the internet without any hint of accountability to the millions of ordinary European citizens who use these services. By placing the onus on Big Tech to carry this out, the EU can censor at arms length, which lowers the risk of mass opposition from within Europe. It is cunning but cowardly. The EUs technocratic, anti-democratic impulse to censor is being outsourced to Big Tech. And all the leading Big Tech firms have agreed to operate under these regulations, even to the point of funding the EU regulatory body that will supervise their operations.

Big Tech has little choice but to comply. It is, after all, the price firms will pay to remain operational in Europe. Even Elon Musk has fallen in line, despite his promises last year to make Twitter a common digital town square with minimal censorship and maximal free expression. Good meeting with Thierry Breton regarding EU DSA, Musk tweeted in January. The goals of transparency, accountability and accuracy of information are aligned with ours, he said. Emboldened, the EU is now instructing Twitter to employ more content-moderation staff instead of relying on algorithmic moderation.

Perhaps we shouldnt be surprised that Big Tech is motivated by profit rather than principle. What is most shocking is how unaccountable and anti-democratic all this is. Every player in this sorry saga is unaccountable to ordinary people. Each hides behind the other to deflect criticism: the Commission claims its censorship laws are necessary to protect European citizens from the harm of unregulated social-media companies; Big Tech then complies with that law in order to serve its millions of users. While both sides claim to be doing this for the public, neither is remotely accountable to the public.

Worst of all, the EUs censorship regime is now going global. Last year, the EU opened a new office in Silicon Valley to forge closer relationships between EU regulators and Big Tech. Without Big Tech companies of its own, it is only through its regulatory muscle that the EU can claim to be a player on the world stage. Indeed, Washington now appears set to follow suit, with President Biden calling for bi-partisan measures to regulate Big Tech earlier this year.

The DSA has set a precedent that online content should be regulated, and this has now been accepted on principle. As a result, freedom of speech on the internet is effectively dead killed by the EUs undemocratic and authoritarian Digital Services Act.

Dr Norman Lewis is managing director of Futures Diagnosis and a visiting research fellow of MCC Brussels.

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The EUs censorship regime is about to go global - Spiked

Book Challenges Nearly Doubled From 2021

CHICAGO The American Library Association (ALA) today released new data documenting*1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago. The unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubles the 729 challenges reported in 2021.

A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.

Of the reported book challenges, 58% targeted books and materials in school libraries, classroom libraries or school curricula; 41% of book challenges targeted materials in public libraries.

The prevalent use of lists of books compiled by organized censorship groups contributed significantly to the skyrocketing number of challenges and the frequency with which each title was challenged. Of the overall number of books challenged, 90% were part of attempts to censor multiple titles. Of the books challenged, 40% were in cases involving 100 or more books

Prior to 2021, the vast majority of challenges to library resources only sought to remove or restrict access to a single book.

A book challenge is a demand to remove a book from a librarys collection so that no one else can read it. Overwhelmingly, were seeing these challenges come from organized censorship groups that target local library board meetings to demand removal of a long list of books they share on social media, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALAs Office for Intellectual Freedom. Their aim is to suppress the voices of those traditionally excluded from our nations conversations, such as people in the LGBTQIA+ community or people of color.

Each attempt to ban a book by one of these groups represents a direct attack on every persons constitutionally protected right to freely choose what books to read and what ideas to explore, said Caldwell-Stone. "The choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police.

ALA will unveil its highly anticipated list of the top 10 most challenged books in the U.S. on Monday, April 24 during National Library Week, along with its full State of America's Libraries Report. The theme ofNational Library Week 2023, There's More to the Story, focuses on the essential services and programming that libraries offer through and beyond books.

ALA President Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada said, Every day professional librarians sit down with parents to thoughtfully determine what reading material is best suited for their childs needs. Now, many library workers face threats to their employment, their personal safety, and in some cases, threats of prosecution for providing books to youth they and their parents want to read.

ALA began documenting the book challenges reported to us over two decades ago because we want to shine a light on the threat of censorship facing readers and entire communities. Book challenges distract from the core mission of libraries: to provide access to information. That includes access to information and services for learners of all ages, homeschooling parents, job seekers, new computer users, budding readers, entrepreneurs, veterans, tax filers and amateur genealogists just to name a few.

While a vocal minority stokes the flames of controversy around books, the vast majority of people across the nation are using life-changing services that public and school libraries offer. Our nation cannot afford to lose the library workers who lift up their communities and safeguard our First Amendment freedom to read.

Polling conducted by bipartisan research firms in 2022 showed that voters across the political spectrum oppose efforts to remove books from libraries and have confidence in libraries to make good decisions about their collections. To galvanize support for libraries and respond to the surge in book challenges and other efforts to suppress access to information, in 2022 ALA launched Unite Against Book Bans, a national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship.The coalition will mark its first anniversary during National Library Week.

* ALA compiles data on book challenges from reports filed with its Office for Intellectual Freedom by library professionals in the field and from news stories published throughout the United States. Because many book challenges are not reported to the ALA or covered by the press, the 2022 data compiled by ALA represents only a snapshot of book censorship throughout the year. A challenge to a book may be resolved in favor of retaining the book in the collection, or it can result in a book being restricted or withdrawn from the library.

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American Library Association reports record number of demands to ... - ala.org