The Betting Window Is Open

I’m not sure which Scissorhead got there first, but collect your winnings:

Our pals over at Electoral-Vote were busy sussing out the odds, and Lord Damp Nut already struck:

So if the suit has virtually no chance of going anywhere, why is Trump doing it?

• Theory 1: Trump is angry at being muzzled and when angry he just lashes out, often against the wishes of his advisers and lawyers. The lawsuits are intended to release some anger and make him feel good.
• Theory 2: It’s the grift. Less than an hour after filing, Trump started sending e-mails and text messages to his supporters saying that the big tech companies are muzzling him and only through their donations can he be allowed to speak again on their behalf. The pitches will lead the sheep to a website that will have a hidden box pre-checked to make the donations repeat every month unless the sheep figure out where the box is and try to uncheck it. This might not even be possible without entering a secret password that can be obtained only by sending two Wheaties box tops and a check for $20 to some post office box in Panama.
• Theory 3: Trump wants to be in the news. He loves the spotlight. And if that is the goal, it worked. We wrote a story about him. So did the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, Axios, CNN, USA Today, The Hill, and a few hundred other media outlets all over the country (and the world).
• Theory 4: Trump wants Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act overturned. This section states that companies that allow user-generated content are not liable for that content. If that provision were to be struck down by the Supreme Court and Twitter could be sued for something a user (say, Trump) posted, they would have to vet every posting before putting it up. This would make them very skittish about possible lawsuits so they would install AI software that blocked everything not relating to cute cat videos.
• Theory 5: He wants to move the Overton Window and start getting the public to believe that tech companies are liberals and unfairly censor conservatives. In a recent Supreme Court case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that tech companies should be treated as common carriers, like phone companies, and not be allowed to censor any content. Needless to say, if that became the law, almost all Websites that allow user-posted content would soon be awash in hard-core pornography, hard-core racism, hard-core hatred of all stripes, and tons of advertising, forcing the owners to turn off user commenting. For sites like Newspapers, loss of user comments wouldn’t be such a big deal, but for Twitter, whose entire reason for existence is to allow user comments, it would be the end of the road.

Gonna go with numbers 1, 2, and 3, but mostly #2 (Trump is a world-class #2, if you know what I mean and I think you do.)