Prime

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is.

The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers has a study out today providing data on women in state legislatures in 2023. There are a number of interesting data sets and charts. But the one that got my attention is the list of top ten and bottom ten states by female representation in state legislatures. The states on the lists are about what you would expect. The top ten states are blue states and the bottom ten are thoroughly red. The only real exception is Arizona — number three on the top ten — which may be trending blue but can’t really be called a blue state yet. The bottom ten aren’t just red. They’re overwhelmingly in the South and Deep South — Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana. The spread is also eye-popping. The most female representation was 60.3%. The lowest was West Virginia at 11.9%.

But what jumped out at me was the number one state in the top ten: Nevada.

Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority expressed great skepticism at the Biden White House’s debt-relief plan yesterday. What we should note, however, is how the press and opinion-setting conventional wisdom has reacted to that fact. Every reaction I’ve seen sees it as the White House failing, the White House getting its collective knuckles rapped, basically an attempt and a failure. The White House is in a lot of ways complicit in this state of affairs and that traces back to an abiding set of assumptions, ingrained almost beneath the level of conscious thought, that the Court is a legitimate rule-enforcing body which is owed respect and deference and shouldn’t be pulled into the political fray.

That’s a mistake.

In recent days I’ve seen every major paper write a version of the How Did This Tragic Train Derailment Become a New Culture War story. I didn’t need to ask myself whether any of them gave the actual answer, which I think most of us know. How is it that a train derailment caused by a major GOP-donating corporation, in a state run by a Republican governor, caused at least in part by regulations rolled back by Republican President Donald Trump … well, how exactly is that a story about Democrats not caring about people in “flyover country”? The Republican crackpot investigations complex is even now prepping to hold hearings about it.

A friend sent me an article from back in March 2016 which provides some interesting perspective on the current resurgence of Social Security politics and the various Republicans vying to be the “post-Trump” candidate for President while Trump refuses to leave the stage. It also has particular relevance to Ron DeSantis, which we’ll get to in a moment.

But first some context.

The piece is a Times article from March 2016. So it is early in the Trump takeover of the GOP but when it still wasn’t entirely clear he’d be able to pull it off. The subtext of the article is that while many Republicans focused either on the power of Trump’s chaotic personality or the red meat of immigrant bans and xenophobia to explain his success, there was something else in the mix. There was a whole population of people who had closed the door on ever supporting Democrats but were left entirely cold by the GOP’s reflexive focus on tax cuts, free trade and cutting “entitlements.”

I’ve mentioned this many times before. But it’s one of the true privileges of this job to have the asset of this site’s readership as I explore new issues raised in the news. Readers who were only readers for years and now sometimes decades become active participants as the site’s focus shifts to their area of expertise. “20 year reader here,” said one last night, “finally you address a topic I’m an expert in!”

I’ve heard from a range of readers who are top executives and engineers at companies on the forefront of artificial intelligence, computer science academics, people who have some angle of expertise on the topic. I’ve been hearing from more people on the “pro-AI” side of things. But “pro” or “con” doesn’t really do justice to the conversation.

Amidst all the storm and drama I’ve been enjoying learning more about just how the current crop of AI applications (LLMs, or Large Language Models) operate. I don’t want to imply that I understand them at a deep level — my programming career peaked with some piecework programming in Visual Basic that I did in grad school. (Actually, there was also that extremely elegant bubble sort program I wrote in middle school. But I digress …) But it has at least given me some sense of the roots of the limitations that are coming to the fore. Specifically — but not only — the way applications like ChatGPT frequently fabricate false claims clothed in the trappings of facticity. I’m not just claiming this new protein structure exists. I’m citing the specific journal article with the page numbers and date and authors, etc. It’s got to be true!