Fox News Defamation Settlement

Is this the big decimation denouement that the left's is jonesin' for? 

There's a lot of churn at Memeorandum, with what looks like is absolute glee at this defeat for Rupert Murdoch.

At the New York Times, "A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie":

Fox News’s late-stage agreement with Dominion Voting Systems came with a rare acknowledgment of broadcasting false claims by the conservative media powerhouse.

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?

But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming “to be false” at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network.

“Money is accountability,” Stephen Shackelford, a Dominion lawyer, said outside the courthouse, “and we got that today from Fox.”

The terms of the agreement, which was abruptly announced just before lawyers were expected to make opening statements, did not require Fox to apologize for any wrongdoing in its own programming — a point that Dominion was said to have been pressing for.

Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fox said it was “hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

The settlement carries an implicit plea of “no contest” to several pretrial findings from the presiding judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, that cast Fox’s programming in exceptionally harsh light.

In one of those findings, the judge sided with Dominion in its assertion that Fox could not claim that its airing of the conspiracy theory — generally relating to the false claim that its machines “switched” Trump votes into Biden votes — fell under a legally protected status of “news gathering” that can shield news organizations when facts are disputed. The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”

In another finding, the judge wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

Through those findings, the judge seriously limited Fox’s ability to argue that it was acting as a news network pursuing the claims of a newsmaker, in this case, the president of the United States, who was the lead clarion for the false Dominion narrative.

In those heady days before the first day of trial, Fox had been indicating that if it were to lose at trial, it would work up an appeal that would, at least partly, argue with those judicial rulings. Now they stand undisputed.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, it was clear that Fox’s lawyers were engaged in an urgent calculus to take the financial hit rather than risk losing at trial.

As so many legal experts before the trial had argued, Dominion had managed to collect an unusual amount of internal documentation from Fox showing that many inside the company knew the Dominion election conspiracy theory was pure fantasy. That extended to the network’s highest ranks — right up to Mr. Murdoch himself.

That evidence appeared to bring Dominion close to the legal threshold in defamation cases known as “actual malice” — established when defamatory statements are “made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or not.” (That bar, however, is not always easy to meet, and there are no guarantees in front of a jury.)

“Dominion Voting had elicited much critical evidence that Fox had acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth, which it could have proved to a jury, so the only question remaining would have been damages,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “Trial of the case also might have undermined the reputation of Fox when the evidence was presented in open court.”

It was less surprising that Fox settled than that it did so at such a late stage on Tuesday...

Keep reading. 

Transgenderism as Religion

It's Tucker Carlson:

Sean Hannity Indicts the Trump Indictment (VIDEO)

Well, it's outrageous.

WATCH:

Left Is Not Woke

From Susan Neiman, at UnHerd, "The true Left is not woke: Progressive activists have forgotten their roots."

Abigail Shrier:

For Hillsdale College:

U.S. Aims to Chart New Course for Chip Industry

At the Wall Street Journal, "$53 billion plan, a mix of subsidies and conditions, will be a test of U.S. industrial policy: Companies receiving money to build domestic semiconductor facilities under the $53 billion Chips Act will have to meet a series of requirements imposed by the government."

The newspaper's editorial is here: "The Chips Act Becomes Industrial Social Policy: Gina Raimondo uses semiconductor subsidies to impose progressive priorities via corporations."

Kaylee McGhee White for Prager University (VIDEO)

Holy crap, this video!

Kaylee McGhee White is freakin' awesome.

WATCH:

The Left Has Given Up on Ordinary Americans

From Batya Ungar-Sargon, at Spiked, "Batya Ungar-Sargon on how the working classes are being sacrificed to elite virtue-signalling":

The modern left hasn’t just abandoned its former working-class supporters – it has actively turned against them, too. More often than not, in elite leftist circles, ordinary working people are looked down upon with disdain, as having the wrong political views and the wrong cultural tastes. Worse still, many of the left’s preferences are clearly harmful to workers. The green agenda, in particular, shows little regard for the lives and livelihoods of vast swathes of the population. So how did we get here?

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. She recently joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: Whenever you talk about the working class nowadays, someone will accuse you of making a racist dog-whistle. Why are questions of class and economic inequality being dismissed in this way?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: I consider myself a left-wing populist. Routinely, people on the left would say that I’m a conservative and that the points I make are conservative talking points. I always laughed at this because, first of all, I don’t think ‘conservative’ is an insult. People expect you to act like somebody just called you fat.

The other point is that it’s basically an admission that caring about class is now a right-wing position, and that being on the left no longer means caring about class.

This comes out in some funny ways. For example, when Elon Musk fired a lot of Twitter staff. We now know that those people were totally superfluous to the operation of Twitter, because the site is still completely operational. It turned out that a large number of people who worked there did an hour or two of work a day and then spent the rest of the time drinking matcha lattes. The average pay was $160,000 per year, for these funny-sounding jobs that didn’t seem to entail much work at all. A lot of Twitter employees were also working from home, and when Musk demanded that they come in at least once a month, they refused to. When they were fired, the left took up their cause like it was some great labour catastrophe – as if the real working class is made up of content managers at Twitter.

You see this a lot in the media as well. They take their unionising very seriously at these knowledge-industry jobs, where the average pay is $100,000 per year. I’m not saying those jobs shouldn’t be unionised, but don’t tell me you’re the proletariat if you sit behind a desk and make $100,000 a year. You’re part of the elites, you’re in the top 20 per cent. You’ve taken a bigger share of the economic pie and, as a result, you believe you deserve a bigger share of the political pie. That’s really what it comes down to.

You shouldn’t speak up on behalf of working-class people just because you agree with their opinions – you should speak up because a democracy requires sharing power. Throughout history, shared power has been tied to shared economic success, to upward mobility and to the middle class. If you don’t have a working class that has access to a middle-class life, then all political power is going to get funnelled to the top, and to the elites. Unfortunately, that’s how the leftist elites like it.

O’Neill: We have a situation now where the elites expressly call for working-class people to be deprived of certain jobs. In the UK, the government has given the go-ahead to a coal mine, which will create hundreds of well-paid jobs for working-class people. But the progressive set is actively agitating against that. What does the ideology of environmentalism tell us about class?

Ungar-Sargon: The coverage of the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos last month comes to mind here. It was amazing to watch. In any other era the left would have seen Davos for the sort of disgusting display of conspicuous consumption and elite vanity that it was. But instead those claiming to be progressive looked at Davos and saw their values being represented there. In a way, it’s genius. Through the green movement, the elites have created what the left always accused the right of doing – they have created a value system that makes the difference between the billionaire class and the educated elites fungible. Both of these groups are on board with the idea of this apocalyptic vision. They agree that the most important thing is the climate, and that we’re all going to die if we don’t solve it.

Getting the top 20 per cent to see their interests as aligned with gazillionaires is what is greasing the wheels of the green movement.

O’Neill: Do the elites really believe in the green agenda? Or do they just benefit from it?

Ungar-Sargon: I think they definitely believe it. I don’t think you can look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, and not see somebody who is deeply sincere. The only thing that makes me think that they don’t believe it is the private jets. If you believed so deeply in man-made climate change, surely the first thing you would do is ban private jets. But on the whole I do think they believe it. It would be very hard to pull off at this scale if they didn’t.

The way the elites think of the economy is very related to green ideology. They picture an economy in which the top 20 per cent keeps making over $100,000 a year and lives in nice neighbourhoods and nice cities. All production is done in China. All service-industry jobs are performed by slave-wage Venezuelans brought in by cartels. And everybody making under $100,000 a year – who used to be the working class – is on universal basic income. That’s the view that a lot of so-called progressives consciously or unconsciously have of their ideal economic system.

Of course, this fits right into the green movement. You can’t have a middle class without cheap, affordable fuel and energy. And climate activists don’t believe in cars, they don’t believe in trucks, they don’t believe in farming. They don’t believe in the jobs that we actually rely on to survive. They’ve essentially given up on America. They’re definitely not proud of America, they’re ashamed of it. They hate conservatives, religious people, Republicans, people who voted for Trump. To them, those people are anathema to the good life...

 

Thousands Sign Letter Protesting the New York Times' Coverage of Trans People, Coordinated With Letter from GLAAD -- New York Times Defends Its Journalism

A big brouhaha today on the trans extremist world. 

At Neiman Lab, "One open letter draws parallels between the Times’ coverage of trans people and, in earlier decades, its coverage of gay people and HIV/AIDS."

And see Esther Wang, "New York Times Writers Call Out the Paper’s Anti-Trans Onslaught":

On Wednesday morning, a group of almost 200 journalists and writers released an open letter addressed to the New York Times, sharing their "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people" and criticizing how the Times has "follow[ed] the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation."

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people; just yesterday, South Dakota became the sixth state to ban or restrict gender-affirming care for youth, efforts that one conservative activist recently acknowledged was merely the first step toward their goal of banning transition care altogether.

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

As the critic Tom Scocca wrote of the Times' reporting, "This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care." He then asked: "If it's not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?"

Loads of links at the article, but see, if you can stomach it, "THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids?" (Via Memeorandum.)

J.K. Rowling: My Comments About Real Women Being Real Women Have Been 'Profoundly Misunderstood'. Please Don't Murder Me

At AoSHQ, "She says her comments about sex being real have been "profoundly misunderstood."

Insurrection: Trans Extremists Break Into Oklahoma State House With Intent of Stopping Democratic Vote on Law

At AoSHQ, "You'll be forgiven if the idea of an angry, threatening mob invading a 'sacred space of democracy' with the express intention of stopping or delaying a democratic vote sounds a little "insurrection-like" to you. Before getting to that, let's talk about the other recent incidents of Trans Bullying we're being forced to endure."

Positionality

Via Woke Temple:

Predator's Paradise

A must-read to understanding the obscenely deranged leftist-Democrat polices now taking over the once-Golden State. 

From Abigail Shrier, at City Journal, "On the grounds of creating a more welcoming environment for LGBTQ youth, State Senator Scott Wiener is making California a haven for human trafficking."

U.S. Added 517,000 Jobs as Hiring Accelerated in January

Well, that recession everyone's been predicting hasn't materialized. This economy is sizzling, *despite* the loathed Biden administration's efforts to throttle it.

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. added 517,000 jobs in January, snapping five-month string of slowing employment growth":

The U.S. labor market accelerated at the start of the year as broad-based hiring added a robust 517,000 jobs and pushed the unemployment rate to a 53-year low.

January’s payroll gains were the largest since July 2022 and snapped a string of five straight months of slowing employment growth, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate was 3.4% last month, its lowest level since May 1969.

Wage growth continued to soften last month, despite the strong job gains. Average hourly earnings grew 4.4% in January from a year earlier, down from a revised 4.8% in December. Annual revisions to employment and pay data suggest that wage growth has been cooling—but at a slower pace than previously thought.

The average workweek rose to 34.7 hours, the highest since March 2022.

“This is just incredibly, surprisingly strong,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. “Not only are you hiring more workers but the workers you have overall are working more hours. It doesn’t really get stronger than that.”

The hiring gain was well above economists’ expectations. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected 187,000 new jobs last month.

The report likely keeps the Federal Reserve on track to raise interest rates by another quarter-percentage point at its meeting next month and to signal another increase is likely after that. The central bank raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point this week to a range between 4.5% and 4.75%.

The Fed is trying to keep the economy growing at a slower-than-average pace to weaken demand and cool inflation. But the report Friday suggested the labor market had been even more resilient in recent months than recently reported, with the growth in average hour earnings and payrolls revised higher at the end of last year.

Stocks fell and bond yields climbed following the jobs report.

Payrolls grew in a range of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, professional and business services and healthcare. The hiring surge contrasted against high-profile corporate layoff announcements, particularly by tech companies that have cut back amid economic uncertainty...

 

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option

At Amazon, Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don't Know

This is outrageous. Nothing good will come of sidelining parents like this --- it's tantamount to having the state take your kid away from you.

At the New York Times, "Educators are facing wrenching new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students socially transition at school":

Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.

When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.

Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her?

It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.

“There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper, and in the classroom, our daughter was our son,” Mrs. Bradshaw said.

The Bradshaws have been startled to find themselves at odds with the school over their right to know about, and weigh in on, such a major development in their child’s life — a dispute that illustrates how school districts, which have long been a battleground in cultural conflicts over gender and sexuality, are now facing wrenching new tensions over how to accommodate transgender children.

The Bradshaws accepted their teenager’s new gender identity, but not without trepidation, especially after he asked for hormones and surgery to remove his breasts. Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety. He had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, and, to his parents, seemed not to know exactly who he was yet, because he had repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.

Given those complexities, Mrs. Bradshaw said she resented the fact that the school had made her feel like a bad parent for wondering whether educators had put her teenager, a minor, on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee.

“It felt like a parenting stab in the back from the school system,” she said. “It should have been a decision we made as a family.”

The student, now 16, told The New York Times that his school had provided him with a space to be himself that he otherwise lacked. He had tried to come out to his parents before, he said, but they didn’t take it seriously, which is why he asked his school for support.

“I wish schools didn’t have to hide it from parents or do it without parental permission, but it can be important,” he said. “Schools are just trying to do what’s best to keep students safe and comfortable. When you’re trans, you feel like you are in danger all the time. Even though my parents were accepting, I was still scared, and that’s why the school didn’t tell them.”

Although the number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States remains small, it has nearly doubled in recent years, and schools have come under pressure to address the needs of those young people amid a polarized political environment where both sides warn that one wrong step could result in irreparable harm.

The public school that Mrs. Bradshaw’s son attends is one of many throughout the country that allow students to socially transition — change their name, pronouns, or gender expression — without parental consent. Districts have said they want parents to be involved but must follow federal and, in some cases, state guidance meant to protect students from discrimination and violations of their privacy.

Schools have pointed to research that shows that inclusive policies benefit all students, which is why some education experts advise schools to use students’s preferred names and pronouns. Educators have also said they feel bound by their own morality to affirm students’ gender identities, especially in cases where students don’t feel safe coming out at home.

But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home. Although some didn’t want their children to transition at all, others said they were open to it, but felt schools forced the process to move too quickly, and that they couldn’t raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled “unsafe.”

Many advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. youth counter that parents should stop scapegoating schools and instead ask themselves why they don’t believe their children. They said ensuring that schools provide enough support for transgender students is more crucial than ever, given the rise of legislation that blocks their access to bathrooms, sports and gender-affirming care.

These disputes are unfolding as Republicans rally around “parental rights,” a catchall term for the decisions parents get to make about their children’s‌ upbringing. Conservative legal groups have filed a growing number of lawsuits against school districts, accusing them of failing to involve parents in their children’s education and mental health care. Critics say groups like these have long worked to delegitimize public education and eradicate the rights of transgender people.

But how schools should address gender identity cuts through the liberal and conservative divide. Parents of all political persuasions have found themselves unsettled by what schools know and don’t reveal.

Mrs. Bradshaw said she wouldn’t align herself with Republican lawmakers who sought to ban L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but she also felt as though her school’s policy left no room for nuance.

“It is almost impossible to have these discussions,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. “There is no forum for someone like me.”

Other self-described liberal parents said they registered as independents or voted for Republican candidates for the first time as a result of this issue. Although they haven’t sued, some have retained lawyers affiliated with the largest legal organization on the religious right to battle their children’s schools.

In November, Erica Anderson, a well-known clinical psychologist who has counseled hundreds of children over gender identity-related issues and is transgender herself, filed an amicus brief in a Maryland lawsuit in support of parents represented by a conservative law group. The parents have argued that their district’s policy violates their own decision-making authority.

Transitioning socially, Dr. Anderson wrote, “is a major and potentially life-altering decision that requires parental involvement, for many reasons.”

She told the Times that she had to push aside her qualms about working with conservative lawyers. “I don’t want to be erased as a transgender person, and I don’t want anyone’s prerogatives or identity to be taken away from them,” she said, “but on this one, I’m aligned with people who are willing to advocate for parents.”

The debate reflects how the interests of parents and those of their children do not always align, said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who has written a book about constitutional conflict in public schools...

 

The Big Problem With the Biden Documents Story

From Byron York, at the Washington Examiner, "The biggest problem with the Joe Biden documents story is this: We know only what Joe Biden's lawyers have told us. And the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the case will make the problem worse."

Americans Pessimistic on Congress

A new USA Today/Ipsos poll, "What's going to happen in Washington over the next 2 years? Americans don't expect much: An exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll shows pessimism about the prospect for compromise or action by a divided government."

Via Susan Page:

ICYMI: Why is bipartisanship so difficult? In our new @USATODAY @IpsosUS poll, only one in ten Americans thinks neither major political party is too extreme. How can you compromise when you think the other side, or both sides, are out of the mainstream? >>> https://t.co/1o7heVVM8W

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) January 16, 2023

The Privatization of Policing

From Emma Freire, at Compact, "David, 26, is shoplifting peanut butter from the Stadium Shopping Center in Portland, Ore. He has been living on the streets for about a month. Already addicted to heroin, he had started using fentanyl four days earlier. The store’s personnel spot him and call their private security firm Echelon Protective Services. They know that if they call the police, they might have to wait up to two hours. And this situation needs to be dealt with right away. The shopping center’s management pays Echelon to patrol the area at all times."

RTWT.

How the 2022 Midterms Rewrote American Politics

At Vanity Fair, "Honey, We Dumped the Playbook: 10 Ways the Midterms Rewrote American Politics in 2022":

The counterintuitive takeaways from November’s Big Blue Surprise election.

One of the few absolute constants of American politics is that every election cycle brings its own surprises. Which, like good drama, makes elections interesting and entertaining—and, often, real nail-biters.

Inevitably, no matter how much analysis or how many polls are conducted, the results prove the experts wrong. In fact, arguably—despite advances in knowledge, data, and technology—we’ve been getting it more wrong than ever before. How does that happen?

Well, this election was a good example of how we become seduced by convenient narratives. One of the obvious tools we use is history. We look back at the accumulated experience of past elections to project what might happen in the future. But this can be extremely misleading and misguided. Because it leads to the kind of thinking I hear all the time from political insiders: “X won’t happen because X has never happened before.”

Then you have a Black man elected president. And a real estate huckster from New York City. And a peanut farmer from Georgia. And an actor from California. All things never thought possible. Until they happened. So, the only real rule here is: Things aren’t possible in politics—until they are.

Let’s look back at the Big Blue Surprise of November 2022. In this election, by using history as a guide, a red wave was predicted. In only two midterms since 1934 has the president’s party not lost seats in the House, and one of those was simply due to a post–9/11 blush of support for the incumbent.

Also, over the last decade, Republicans had won most redistricting fights and were therefore expected to pick up seats simply as a result of more GOP-favorable electoral maps.

On top of that, the Republicans seemed on the offensive on three key issues that were plaguing the Democrats: the troubled state of the economy, crime, and immigration.

Reporters are often criticized for reporting and writing analysis and predictions from their offices in places like Washington, DC, and never getting their boots on the ground around the country.

But, wait a moment. I can testify to how misleading this sort of anecdotal canvassing can be. For the work I do for the weekly political series The Circus, on Showtime, I spent most of the fall traveling all over America, going to coffee shops, truck stops, bus tours, house parties, and small-town rallies. In fact, since 2016, I have adopted a sort of “momentum test” based on what I see on the ground in the last two weeks leading up to an election. My fieldwork out on the hustings six years ago, for example, told me something tangible during that Hillary Clinton–Donald Trump face-off. Yes, I certainly believed, along with 99% of the rest of the country, that Clinton was likely to win. But about seven days before voters went to the polls, I made the assertion on Megyn Kelly’s show, on Fox News, that a person out in the heartland—in the political thick of things during the last week of a campaign—usually gets a sense which direction the momentum is headed. And I said that Trump seemed to have some winds at his back.

This past November, as well, those winds were all blowing in a seemingly discernable direction. Our team from The Circus put on a full-scale blitz and went to 17 states in the final few days of the campaign. And if you judged what the outcome might be—simply by the size and enthusiasm of crowds—you’d likely have guessed: red wave.

New Hampshire was a good example. Democratic senator Maggie Hassan had seemed in solid shape until the final weeks when polls showed the race tightening. I went to an event at her campaign headquarters, which by any objective standards was modest. A small group of supporters appeared earnest, committed, and dutiful, but hardly excited. On the other hand, Hassan’s MAGA-leaning, Trump-endorsed opponent, retired Army general Don Bolduc, held one of his many town hall meetings and he drew an SRO crowd of supporters who were enthusiastic, committed, and energized.

Hassan won comfortably by 10 points.

So who are you gonna trust? The partisans and hucksters or your own lyin’ eyes?

With this in mind, let’s go down the list of some surprises and counterintuitive lessons we learned in these topsy-turvy, down-is-up midterms...

Keep reading.