Most Foul: A South Carolina jury took less than three hours yesterday to convict disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh of murdering his wife Maggie 52, and son Paul, 22, on the family’s hunting estate in June of 2021. The judge set sentencing for today and Murdaugh faces 30 years to life in prison.

  South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said, “Alex Murdaugh’s house of cards, built on the foundation of lies, manipulation, and theft, came crashing down.”

  Murdaugh is from a family line of influential small-town lawyers. But he fell into addiction to pills and stole as much as $8.5 million from his clients. He even took money from a quadriplegic.

  In was in interesting case in which investigators never found the two guns used in the killings or any blood spattered clothing that would have been worn by the shooter. But Murdaugh’s voice was recorded on a video his son Paul took at the dog kennels only minutes before the murders.

  The case was mostly circumstantial, outlined in part by telephone evidence of Murdaugh’s phone calls and the number of steps he took, as if he was frantic, in a period of only a few minutes at about the time of the murders.

  Murdaugh also lied for a year and a half about having been at the dog kennels, admitting it only on the witness stand. It looked bad. He was put in the position of admitting everything he ever lied about, then denied the murders.

  His surviving son Buster was in the gallery, weeping, when the verdict was delivered.

The Price of Dissent: A court in Belarus sentenced Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison. Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel in October  for his decades of defending human rights in Belarus. 

  Bialiatski founded a human rights group called Viasna, most of the members of which are now exiled or in prison. Belarus is one of Russia’s closest allies and a key supporter of its war in Ukraine. Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko allowed Russia to use his territory as a staging ground for the Ukraine invasion a year ago.

  Bialiatski was arrested in 2021 on charges of tax evasion, which his supporters say are trumped up. He was in jail when he was notified that he had won the Nobel.

Fox in the House: While Fox News faces a potentially crippling lawsuit over fostering lies about election rigging in 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene this week to promote her proposal about a “national divorce” in which the red states and blue states would go their separate ways. 

  What Fox did after the election was feed its audience what they wanted to hear, that the 2020 election was rigged. And now they have Greene, who told the host, “What I’m talking about is reducing the size of our federal government  and giving more control to our states to identify what they want to be whether it’s red or blue.” She said, “We want our own safe space and we deserve it.”

  Fox News doesn’t care if its content is destructive so long as it pleases their audience. 

Woke Wars: Democrats in the Connecticut legislature have introduced a bill to end use of the label “Latinx” from government documents in a rare moment of agreement with conservative Republicans across the country who also want to abolish the word. But that’s where the agreement ends.

  “Latinx” was coined about 20 years ago to be a gender-neutral reference to people of Hispanic origin. Republicans have denounced it as another one of those “woke” tropes imposed upon everyone. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders banned it from state documents in one of her first acts in office, calling it “ethnically insensitive and pejorative language,” even though it was intended to be sensitive and respectful.

  Some Democrats in Connecticut, on the other hand,  say the term is both an act of cultural appropriation and erasure. “The Spanish language, which is centuries old, defaults to Latino for everybody,” State Rep. Geraldo Reyes Jr said. “It’s all-inclusive. They didn’t need to create a word, it already exists.”

  But wait, there’s more. Maia Gil’Adi, an assistant professor of Latinx and Multiethnic Literature at Boston University, said “The word Latino is incredibly exclusionary, both for women and for non-gender-conforming people.” And she said, “The term Latinx is really useful because of the way it challenges those conceptions.”

Family Ties: Britain’s new King Charles has ordered his son Harry and wife Meghan Markle to vacate Frogmore Cottage, their official UK residence that was given to them by the late Queen Elizabeth as a wedding gift. They’ve lived in California for three years following a split with the family. 

  The British newspaper The Sun reported that Charles III has offered the property to his brother Andrew, who was stripped of his royal titles following accusations that he was involved that he was involved with Jeffrey Epstein in having sex with underage girls.

The Spin Rack: The House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to investigate Long Island Republican Rep. George Santos, who lied his way to a seat in Congress last fall. — Convicted Theranos technology fraudster Elizabeth Holmes delivered a second child and asked the judge to delay sending her off for her 11-year sentence because she has “two very young children” to be with. — Former President Donald Trump can be sued in civil court for inciting the January 6^th insurrection, the Justice Department ruled. The DOJ said, “Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency,” but “It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.”  

Below the Fold: Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill banning drag shows in public places, making his the first state to do so. This comes after the discovery of a 1977 high school photo of the Republican governor in public, dressed in in drag. 

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