Gov. Kristi Noem has reacted to most of the criticism she’s received for executing her dog Cricket and lying about a meeting with North Korea’s paramount leader Kim Jung Un by saying city folk just don’t know the rural folkways of South Dakota. But it turns out Noem’s dog murdering ways are taking a toll on her support in South Dakota too. A new poll shows her job approval has dipped significantly since the Cricket imbroglio, now only just over 50% (52.2%). That’s down from an April poll which had her at 59%. And her favorability rating — which looks at personal qualities rather than job performance — is clearly in negative territory. 48% unfavorable and only 38.6% favorable.

And then there’s the big question: Was Noem justified in shooting cricket in the face just because the dog was a bit of a spaz and didn’t turn in a good performance on her first hunting outing?

Press release just out from Durbin’s office tonight …

DURBIN: JUSTICE ALITO MUST RECUSE HIMSELF FROM CASES RELATED TO THE 2020 ELECTION AFTER ‘APPEAL TO HEAVEN’ FLAG WAS FLOWN AT HIS HOME

Durbin also called for the passage of the SCERT Act, legislation that requires Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of ethics

You may have noticed that we have a series of new controversies or set pieces in the ongoing public conversation about AI. One of them has to do with Google search. Google recently rolled out, or in some regions is in the process of rolling out, a new AI-enabled version of search. You may have seen it already without noticing it was something new. On some searches you’ll now see that the top of your search has text under a small rubric that says “AI Overview.” This is potentially a very big deal for search and the whole ecosystem of the web.

Search, which has been dominated by Google for more than 20 years, has long been ruled by a mutually beneficial exchange between Google and websites. Google makes huge profits by running ads against its search results. It also copies small portions of other sites’ text and photographs under its theory of fair use. The justification for the profit and its use of sites’ content is that Google makes the web navigable, and it can send massive audiences to the sites that make up the web. In the first years of this century, various rights holders contested aspects of Google’s fair use policies. But they tended to lose those challenges and it became largely accepted that search, very much part of the open web, was actually good for the indexed websites.

In principle, at least, this understanding came to undergird the successful fair use arguments. Broadly, fair use says you can reproduce limited portions of a rights holder’s content if you don’t damage their ability to make money from it.

We have a new set of swing state polls out this morning from Bloomberg/Morning Consult. They show a number of things, which we’ll get to in a moment. But at a meta or media amplification level they also help us again see the massive megaphone tied to the NYT/Siena poll, notwithstanding the fact that its results were questionable in the 2022 cycle and have been big (Trump-favorable) outliers for much of this cycle. There are lots of polls. But the NYT-Siena poll’s outsized impact on news headlines extends even beyond the Times own brand and reach.

So let’s look at this new set of polls.