Need to Know for July 31

July 31, 2018 JMORE Staff

Gov. Larry Hogan (Handout photo)

Governor Larry Hogan, The Notorious RBG, Les Moonves and more from Sacha Baron Cohen

The 2nd most popular governor in the U.S.

The political website Morning Consult calls Maryland Governor Larry Hogan the second most popular governor in the United States. They do this on the basis of online surveys conducted with roughly 275,000 registered voters, and they find Hogan with a 68 percent approval rating and a 17 percent disapproval rating. According to Morning Consult, there’s only one other governor in America with numbers this good – Charlie Baker, of Massachusetts, who has 69 percent approval. The third most popular governor, until recently, was Vermont’s Phil Scott, who had a 65 percent approval rating until last spring, when he signed a landmark gun control law in historically gun-friendly Vermont. He’s since dropped to No. 4. What makes each of these three rankings noteworthy is that they’re all Republicans serving in traditionally Democratic states – and each of them carefully keeping this Republican president at arm’s length. With Election Day getting closer, Pres. Donald Trump announced last week that he intends to spend much of his time out in the hinterlands, campaigning for Republican candidates. Some of those Republicans – including Larry Hogan – are smart enough to let the White House know they don’t particularly welcome any assistance from Trump.

RBG not going anywhere yet

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she hopes to remain on the court for another five years. “I’m now 85,” Ginsburg said, according to CNN. “My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90 [in 2010], so think I have about at least five more years.” Ginsburg made the statement on July 29 in New York during a discussion following a production of “The Originalist,” a play about her late colleague and friend, Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia died in February of 2016. Ginsburg, who described herself at the event as a “flaming feminist,” remembered Scalia by saying, “If I had my choice of dissenters when I was writing for the court, it would be Justice Scalia.” She characterized their professional relationship and discourse as akin to a ping-pong match. When asked last October at an event sponsored by Equal Justice Works in Arlington, Va., if she was contemplating retirement, Ginsburg said, “As long as I can do the job full steam, I will do it,” CNN reported. Ginsburg, who is marking her 25th anniversary on the Supreme Court this year, has hired law clerks for the next two terms, taking her at least through 2020. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., born to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Ginsburg has survived both colon and pancreatic cancer while serving on the court. She has two children and four grandchildren. Nominated by former President Bill Clinton and confirmed to the Supreme Court in August of 1993, Ginsberg is the court’s oldest justice and among its most liberal. If she left the bench during President Donald Trump’s term, it would give him the opportunity to appoint a third Supreme Court justice. Such a move could likely shift the court’s balance of power for years to come.

CBS will keep Leslie Moonves as CEO pending outcome of investigation

CBS is looking into sexual misconduct allegations against its CEO, Leslie Moonves, who was accused of inappropriate behavior in a New Yorker exposé July 27. Ronan Farrow interviewed six women who alleged that Moonves sexually harassed them between the 1980s and the late 2000s. They said they feared that Moonves, one of Hollywood’s most powerful executives, would sabotage their careers if they rebuffed his advances. Four of them allege that Moonves inappropriately touched and kissed them during business meetings. Farrow, the son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault history, also interviewed other current and former CBS employees over eight months. Some described an environment rife with sexual harassment across multiple departments of the company, including at “60 Minutes” and “CBS News.” CBS stock shares took a hit on July 30, and the CBS board of directors met later in the day to discuss Moonves’ fate. The meeting ended without immediate recommendations and CBS said Moonves would remain CEO pending the outcome of an investigation by outside counsel. It postponed its annual shareholders’ meeting, which had been scheduled for Aug. 10. Moonves and Shari Redstone, the network’s controlling stockholder, have already been locked in a public tussle over control of the company. Deadline reports that it was unclear if Redstone attended the board meeting July 30. Moonves was the head of Viacom before becoming board chairman of the CBS Corp. in 2016. He grew up in a Jewish family in New York City, and is a grand-nephew of the late Paula Ben-Gurion — born Paula Munweis — the wife of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Mark Zuckerberg’s stance on Facebook and Holocaust denial is ‘dangerous,’ Trump appointee says

The chairman of the U.S. Commission to Preserve America’s Heritage Abroad said Mark Zuckerberg’s stance on not removing Holocaust-denial posts from Facebook is “dangerous.” Paul Packer, who was appointed to the independent government agency by President Donald Trump, sent a letter to Zuckerberg a day after the Facebook founder and CEO told Recode, a tech news website, that he would not automatically delete Holocaust-denying posts. In the interview earlier this month, Zuckerberg said that while Facebook would not remove a post denying the Holocaust, the social network would push it down the News Feed to make sure the post did not go viral. “(A)t the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” he said. Packer’s letter in response, dated July 19, was first obtained and published by Axios. “By attempting to rationalize Holocaust denial and by enabling anti-Semites to publish their abhorrent views freely on your platform, you have failed your users and the world at large,” he said. “Furthermore, you have failed to uphold Facebook’s own mission to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.’” Packer called on Zuckerberg to “meet your ethical obligation not to allow the further destruction and endangerment of our history by changing Facebook’s policy immediately so that historical denial of the kind you defended is no longer allowed.” He invited Zuckerberg to join him on one of the commission’s “many trips to countries impacted by Nazi brutality.”

Roy Moore and Sacha Baron Cohen from “Who is America?”

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest victim

There have been two types of reactions by the famous and not so famous to being punked by Sacha Baron Cohen on his “Showtime” series “Who is America?”: outrage or self-deprecating good humor. Roy Moore, the Republican whose bid for the Senate failed last year, was definitely in the “outraged” category. “As an Alabamian, I believe in truth and honesty, which the shadowy media groups behind this illicit scheme do not,” Moore said in a Facebook post on July 12 describing the recording by Cohen’s team in January. He said he may sue. On the third episode, which was broadcast July 29, Cohen delved into allegations that Moore decades ago sexually harassed and assaulted multiple women, including some who were minors. Cohen, in his guise as Israeli terrorism expert Erran Morad, gives Moore a prize for his support of Israel. Morad shows an impressed Moore the latest in Israeli terrorism technology: a wand that detects Hamas tunnels. “They have now used this technology to identify other abnormalities,” the Cohen character says. “It turns out that sex offenders and particularly pedophiles secrete an enzyme 4 DDHD which is actually detectable. It is three times the level of non-perverts.” The wand “beeps” when Morad waves it near Moore, who appears to grow increasingly tense. Morad insists the device must be faulty and keeps testing it, including on an assistant, “Hezy,” and says he does not consider Moore a pedophile. “I never had an accusation of such things,” Moore says in the segment, which was taped just weeks after accusations of such things felled his campaign. It’s not clear that Moore entirely grasps what’s going on. He leaves, but also makes sure to shake hands with Morad. “Maybe Israeli technology hasn’t developed properly,” he says. “I support Israel. I don’t support this kind of stuff.”

J-Word of the Day:
Tayvl (Yiddish)
Meaning: A devil
Usage: Some critics probably think Sacha Baron Cohen is a tayvl right about now.

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