A ‘faith-based’ leader of Moms for Liberty in Philly turns out to be (subscription required) a registered sex offender. But don’t worry: He says he was framed. It was part of a squabble from when he was part of the LaRouche movement back in Chicago, he claims.

AI and who runs the company-cum-non-profit OpenAI is far from much that concerns TPM. But I felt I had to return at least once to the topic of the previous post. Because it did turn out to be “quite a story” but a story of a totally different sort than I’d imagined. The abruptness of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster, the potential loss to investors of tens of billions of dollars and the apparent claims of malfeasance in the company’s announcement made it seem certain that some vast scale of wrongdoing must be at the heart of the story. But now it doesn’t seem like that was the case at all. We still don’t know quite what happened or why. But the weight of evidence now points to some kind of non-wrongdoing-based spat between Altman and certain members of the board. Within a day, the board was trying to get Altman to come back and be CEO again. They’re currently negotiating to see if they can get him to come back. But he may choose to just start his own company with another employee who was canned.

You’ve probably seen the news that Open AI, which created ChatGPT, has fired CEO Sam Altman because the board concluded he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Yikes. He was sacked as CEO and removed from the board. I come at this with no knowledge of the inner workings of the company or Altman. But when a board out of the blue fires a CEO at the helm of a company that has skyrocketed to around $80 billion in value and is at center of huge bets about future economic gains across the economy you have to assume that something really, really bad must have happened.

It may not get a lot of attention. In a way it doesn’t matter since I don’t think anyone cares that George Santos going to do serious time in prison. But in addition to the mistake he made not resigning soon after the original New York Times report last December, he made another big mistake staying in office until this week’s House Ethics report was released. Resignation from office is always a big chit in plea negotiations. There are both good public policy reasons for this (corrupt pols should be removed from office) and it appeals to prosecutors’ inherent desire for a ‘win’. Regardless of the motivation, it’s something a politician can agree to give up and get something in return.

Now it’s too late – even if in theory Santos cut a deal today ahead of getting expelled. It’s like he held on to a hot shot stock portfolio until it dropped down to penny stock levels. It’s now extremely likely he’ll be expelled from office at the end of this month. Prosecutors know that. Resigning in the face of near certain expulsion isn’t worth anything.

Israel’s Channel 12 released a new poll today. It told largely the same story every poll has told since the days just after the October 7th massacres: a big drop for the Likud, a huge jump for Benny Gantz’s National Unity party. Stepping back the current government loses about twenty of its seats while the opposition jumps to roughly 70. Again, this is broadly consistent with all the other polls over the last six weeks. I’ve noted before that while this is a rare occasion where the head of government hasn’t received any kind of rally-round-the-flag effect. Quite the contrary. But if we define rally-round-the-flag as rallying around the country, the war effect or national unity, there is overwhelming evidence of that.

But looking at this and other polls, I think we can make an additional observation.

Just a heads up that, as most of you are likely aware, we’ve been having site issues for most of the day. In addition to the site not being available episodically we’re also having issues with AF subscribers seeing ads. These are all part of, or knock on effects of, the same core issue our techs are currently working on. Hang tight, our team is doing our best to get everything ironed out. We greatly appreciate your patience.

Kate Riga is giving us the play by play on Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to do exactly what Kevin McCarthy did while not paying the price McCarthy did for doing it. As we’re seeing, he’ll almost certainly pull it off. The House Freedom Caucus guys know he’s one of them, at least genetically related if not identical. That’s helping. They also realize they need to give him some time to get his footing before tossing him overboard. But what stands out most is House Republicans’ great reluctance to shut the government down – more reluctance than I expected. New boss, old boss, the same dynamics govern in the spring, the fall and now in the winter.