Month: January 2023

God helps those who service themselves

If there is a silver lining to the MAGAfication of the U.S. House, it is this: outside the Beltway there are signs that Republicans care about something other than owning the libs.

Thomas B. Edsall examines efforts inside several state legislatures to marginalize the governing-be-damned philosophy of the craziest of Republican crazies.

In South Carolina (of all places), the majority Republican caucus has insisted all members sign onto a set of rules prohibiting from campaigning against other members or from dishing to reporters on what transpires inside confidential closed meetings. Refusal to sign would exile members from the caucus.

South Carolina Freedom Caucus members branded the move a “loyalty oath.” A conservative web publication said the rules:

would prohibit members from endorsing or campaigning on behalf of anyone challenging a G.O.P. incumbent in next spring’s primary elections. It would also prohibit lawmakers from posting images of the House’s electronic voting board on their social media pages — and from discussing the “internal processes” behind House votes during public appearances. Basically it’s an incumbent protection ultimatum — accompanied by a muzzle.

It seems that as Donald Trump’s star fades, some in the GOP would like to untarnish their brand.

In Ohio where Republicans were expected to elect hard-right Derek Merrin as speaker, “a bipartisan coalition of 32 Democrats and 22 Republicans” elected “less conservative, less confrontational Republican, Jason Stevens.”

And in Pennsylvania where MAGA Republicans lost in race after high-profile race last November, “enough Republicans joined with Democrats in a bipartisan vote on Jan. 3 to make Mark Rozzi, a centrist Democrat, Speaker of the House.” That, pending the outcomes of special elections to fill three vacancies.

Edsall writes:

Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University, replied by email to my inquiry about developments at the state level, suggesting that evidence of Trump’s weakness in the 2022 election has elevated Republican unease concerning ties to the former president: “I suspect some of what you’re seeing is party leaders updating their beliefs about electoral strategy and also trying to do damage control and protect the party brand going forward.”

It could be that culture war fights are wearing thin with Republican-aligned groups more interested in economic development than in owning the libs, Kogan suggests.

Boston College political scientist Michael Hartney believes “many Republicans are feeling more liberated to focus on pursuing their governing agenda than on appeasing Donald Trump. Clearly Trump is still an important figure in the party, but Trump’s influence has surely waned.”

Neil Newhouse, a Republican founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, believes the recent emergence of more moderate Republicans at the state level “has less to do with G.O.P. legislators reading the tea leaves — signals — from voters calling for more moderation and bipartisanship, and more to do with legislators own self-preservation.”

Servicing themselves

Once, all politics was local. But Trump-, Fox-, and QAnon-fueled MAGA Republicanism has convinced the fringe right that every election is a life-or-death struggle between red, white and blue (especially White) Real Americans™ and a liberal Army of Darkness. Basically, anyone to the left of Ron DeSantis.

But that faction may be wearing out its welcome:

On Jan. 9, CBS News/YouGov released a survey of 2,144 U.S. adult residents interviewed between Jan. 4 and Jan. 6 that showed substantial internal divisions within the Republican Party, between a dominant Trump wing and a smaller but substantial non-Trump faction.

Nearly three quarters of voters CBS called “MAGA Republicans” said “investigating Joe Biden” should be a high priority for the new Congress, while 47 percent of “Non-MAGA Republicans” agreed. Sixty-five percent of Republicans said “being loyal to Donald Trump” is very or somewhat important, while just over a third said such loyalty is not important at all or not very important.

A decisive majority of all voters polled by CBS, at 70 percent, said they would prefer the new Republican House to work with “Biden and the Democrats to enact policies all can agree on,” compared with 30 percent who said the Republican House should “oppose Biden and the Democrats to try to stop their policies.” A majority of Republicans, 52 percent, said the House should oppose Biden and the Democrats, but a not insignificant 48 percent favored working with Biden and the Democrats.

Perhaps Republicans not intent on abolishing the Internal Revenue Service would actually like the people they pay for governing to actually do some. It is clear that the MAGA crowd sees elected office as a vehicle for right-wing celebrity and lucrative influencer status. Public service? Bah! God helps those who service themselves.

Details, details

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s MAGAfied House nevertheless passed on Monday night the supposed “Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act.” At barely over one page, the bill would rescind additional IRS funding approved last year (The Hill):

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated Monday that the legislation would eliminate about $71 billion of the total $80 billion that was allocated for the IRS but would reduce tax revenue by about $186 billion, translating to a $114 billion increase in deficits over the next decade.

Republicans have repeatedly falsely claimed the 87,000 new IRS employees, who would be added over the course of a decade, would be “agents.” 

In normal-speak, the bulk of those would be additional IRS employees hired to ensure that receiving your 2022 refund won’t take nine months or more like last year. Details, details.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an August letter to members of the Senate that the funds from the legislation would be used to up examination of large corporations and high-net-worth individuals and were not designed to raise enforcement for households making less than $400,000. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has also said that the agency would not increase audit rates for those taxpayers making less than $400,000.

The bill will go nowhere in the Senate and President Biden said on Monday he would veto it if the bill made it to his desk. But the play’s the thing for the MAGAs, not actual governing. In fact, the less governing the better.

“We are not going to [get spending under control] on the backs of our troops and our military,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) told Fox. No, they’ll do it on the backs of paycheck workers, children, seniors & the disabled.

“[Republicans] are going to try to cut Social Security and Medicare,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted Monday. Waltz represents Republicans who want to target “the entitlements program” for cuts as though they are public giveaways.

If social insurance is a handout, Republicans, why are we paying premiums with every paycheck?

Details, details.

In his newsletter today, Paul Krugman discusses his early days working in the Reagan administration as a wonky, liberal whiz-kid during a time when the administration was strangling inflation with painfully high unemployment:

Anyway, Marty and I had a working dinner on my arrival night, and he had one big question to ask: “Is the world economy about to collapse?”

There were two main reasons for his concern. One was that Mexico had just announced it was unable to keep paying its debts, marking the beginning of the Latin American debt crisis. The other was that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to fight inflation had sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin, with the nation experiencing its worst recession since the 1930s, not to be rivaled until the financial crisis of 2008.

But as it turned out, the world economy didn’t collapse. The debt crisis produced a “lost decade” in Latin America, with widespread economic suffering, but it didn’t spread into a global contagion. And further north, a policy U-turn by the Fed eventually jump-started a rapid recovery; by 1984 Ronald Reagan was boasting about “morning in America.”

Still, the memory of that summer makes me a bit nervous about the economic optimism that seems to be breaking out all over right now, at least in the media. Predictions of a “soft landing” — inflation falling to acceptable levels without a recession — are proliferating. And my own prediction is indeed for a softish landing: Inflation does seem to be coming down, and while we might not completely avoid a recession, if we have one it will probably be mild.

But the experience of the early 1980s still offers two reasons for caution.

First, controlling inflation in the ’80s was extremely painful. Here’s what used to be the Fed’s preferred measure of underlying inflation (I’ll talk about recent problems with that measure in a minute) versus the unemployment rate from 1979 to 1985:

This was what a hard landing looked like. FRED

Inflation did come down, from around 10 percent to around 4 percent. But the process of disinflation involved a huge, sustained bulge in unemployment. In the economics jargon of the time, there was a very high sacrifice ratio. In late 1984, when Reagan was talking about how great the economy was, the unemployment rate was more than twice what it is right now.

Some people are talking as if we’re going to need to go through a similar ordeal again. At least until a few months ago, Larry Summers was laying out 1980s-type scenarios for disinflation, saying that unemployment would need to rise to close to 6 percent to get inflation under control.

I think he’s wrong. Pandemic-related distortions have made it much harder to estimate underlying inflation, to the point where we’re not even sure what the term truly means, but many of the measures that have been devised in an attempt to cut through the fog are showing moderating inflation even though we have yet to see a rise in unemployment. For example, here’s one measure from the New York Fed, multivariate core trend — trust me, it’s a smart, sensible approach, although not definitive:

Is underlying inflation coming down? Things may indeed be going right. Federal Reserve Bank of New York

If we believe this measure, or what seems to be a downward trend in wage growth, inflation has moderated substantially already — again, without a big rise in unemployment. So, as I said, I think Larry is being far too pessimistic. But am I sure? Of course not.

The other reason the experience of the 1980s still weighs on me is that it was clear in 1982 that the Fed had braked harder than it intended. That is, it was trying to slow the economy down — it had, in effect, deliberately caused a recession — but it didn’t mean to cause a recession that severe. The truth is that then, as now, policymakers were trying to manage the economy with limited, often out-of-date information and using highly imprecise tools.

Specifically, the Fed is trying to reduce inflation by slowing the economy, which it is doing in turn by raising interest rates. But there’s a raging debate over how much the economy needs to slow, how much rates need to rise to achieve a given amount of slowdown and how long rate hikes need to take full effect. I sometimes think of the Fed as trying to operate heavy machinery in a dark room — while wearing heavy mittens.

So, even if we don’t need a severe recession to get inflation under control, we might get one anyway if the Fed brakes too hard. There is, of course, the opposite risk: that the Fed will do too little and inflation won’t come under control. But I think the inflation news has been good enough to justify taking that risk by going easy on rate hikes at least for a while.

The bottom line? A soft landing has become much more plausible than it seemed a few months ago. But it’s not at all a done deal.

Surely, no one can confidently predict this as long as the fed keeps raising interest rates? As for whether they’ve already gone too far, i guess we’ll just have to pray they haven’t.

Lol. Brent Bozell’s far right Media Research Center is calling for the smelling salts because Never Trumper Charlie Sykes laughed at Kevin McCarthy.

Here’s Sykes (from his newsletter, subscription only):

On yesterday’s podcast with Will Saletan, I read this piece aloud, but I’m not sure I can do justice to how much I love this bit of pearl-clutching from the snowflakes at the Media Research Center, so I’ve provided some footnotes.

Here’s how it starts:

The liberal media like to depict Never Trumpers like Charlie Sykes as the voice of center-right reason and moderation. But in recent days¹, the founder of The Bulwark and MSNBC columnist has revealed a spiteful, vulgar streak.²

Believe it or not… it gets better.

Last week, we caught³ him literally laughing⁴ as he reveled in Kevin McCarthy’s sticky predicament in seeking the speakership, and pronouncing with malicious glee⁵ the names of George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene, as people McCarthy had to rely on⁶. But that was tame compared to his spit take⁷ on Jonathan Capehart’s Sunday Show. 

We now get to the Main Event.

Now that McCarthy has secured the Speaker’s gavel, Sykes took Sunday’s Democrat talking point about how the House Republicans will be incapable of governing and headed straight for the crotch⁸: 

“You look at the kind of concessions he’s made, putting the bomb throwers on the Rules committee, the motion to vacate. It is extremely difficult to see how Kevin McCarthy can negotiate anything, because the man has self-gelded his speakership.”

The author then felt he had to define the term for his MRC’s readers:

“Gelded” is, of course, a synonym for castrated.⁹

You might have thought that the normally proper Capehart would have been offended by Sykes’ crude metaphor¹⁰. But to the contrary, he and Michael Steele, of the disgraced Lincoln Project, could be heard laughing off-camera, with one of them saying, “that is true.”¹¹

Right-wing doilies were rumpled and tea spilled. Standards, must be upheld.

For the liberal media, rules of decency and decorum are apparently suspended when it comes to belittling Republicans.¹²

Decency and decorum. Exactly what we always expect from the right-wing media eco-system

I like Sykes and I appreciate that he’s seen the error of his ways and has come over to the light. But I can’t help but remember stuff like this from guys like Sykes. In 2018 he wrote a piece reminiscing about the Democrats’ terrible bad manners at the Paul Wellstone funeral and gave them hell for being too hysterical during the Kavanaugh hearings, saying they were succumbing to the degradation of discourse in public life or some such nonsense. He closed with this:

This raises several questions: Will it be like this if the Democrats take control of Congress? Will they realize that woke emotionalism is not a substitute for sober, substantive politics? Will they discredit their legitimate investigations with illegitimate allegations? Will they embrace Trump’s own ethos in their efforts to overthrow him? Will they overreach and propel Republicans to a 2020 victory? Can they even help themselves?

They answered that question quite handily, didn’t they? So maybe it would be good to look back at the pearl clutching we got from Sykes and all the others throughout the Bush years to assess whether they weren’t just playing the same phony games the Media Research Center is playing with Sykes today. They’ve been using this bullshit double standard for years.

Here’s what they have in mind:

Republicans granted its panel a sweeping mandate that included investigations into pandemic-related school closures, gain-of-function research, vaccine mandates and the trillions of dollars in coronavirus aid Congress approved. The panel doesn’t yet have a Republican leader but expects to hold its first hearing next month. 

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) is set to chair the broader oversight panel under which the covid subcommittee’s work will fall. In an interview with Tony, Comer said investigators planned to “talk to the researchers,” including “all of the people that were involved” at the National Institutes of Health around the development of vaccines. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk handed over all the twitter documents to noted anti-vaxx activist, the novelist Alex Berenson for review:

Alex Berenson, a vocal COVID contrarian whose past commentary on the vaccine has received scorn by critics and praise by fans, was the latest to be granted access to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, publishing his findings on his “Unreported Truths” Substack newsletter. 

Berenson shared an August 2021 email Gottlieb sent to Twitter’s senior public policy manager Todd O’Boyle flagging a tweet written by former Trump administration official Dr. Brett Giroir, who had written “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no scientific justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.”

“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb told O’Boyle. “Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage.”

According to Berenson, O’Boyle forward Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s “Strategist Response” team, writing “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”

Giroir’s tweet was later slapped with a “misleading” label and blocked any ability to like or share the tweet, telling Twitter users “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.”

Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor who was a prominent media pundit in the height of the pandemic, flagged another tweet in Sept. 2021, one from Substack writer and COVID policy critic Justin Hart, which read “Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of ~0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”

“Why Gottlieb objected to Hart’s words is not clear, but the Pfizer shot would soon be approved for children 5 to 11, representing another massive market for Pfizer, if parents could be convinced Covid was a real threat to their kids,” Berenson wrote. 

Berenson noted in his report that Gottlieb has also targeted him days before he was permanently suspended from Twitter (Berenson was later reinstated in July 2022 after a legal battle with the tech giant). 

In the August 2021 tweet Gottlieb flagged, Berenson was critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“This is whats promoted on Twitter. This is why Tony needs a security detail,” Gottlieb told Twitter at the time.

In reaction to the latest Twitter Files, Gottlieb issued his own thread suggesting the disclosed emails don’t tell the whole story. 

“In the past, I’ve raised concerns with Twitter related to the safety of me and others, and threats being made on the platform. This included direct as well as specific threats. Sometimes it included statements that I believed were purposely false and inflammatory,” Gottlieb wrote Monday. “The selective disclosure of my private communications with Twitter stokes the threat environment. So does actions that empower people who’ve shown little restraint when it comes to purposeful vitriol. It instigates more menacing dialogue, with potentially serious consequences.”

Gottlieb went on to share other emails he sent to Twitter flagging threatening tweets directed towards him and his family. 

I’m sure those threats have now escalated as they will when the House extremists call him up to the Hill to testify before their anti-vaxx inquisition.

This piece by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic lays out how spectacularly wrong Berenson is about COVID and the vaccines. It’s astonishing. An excerpt:

In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can).

Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.

The vaccines have inspired his most troubling comments. For the past few weeks on Twitter, Berenson has mischaracterized just about every detail regarding the vaccines to make the dubious case that most people would be better off avoiding them. As his conspiratorial nonsense accelerates toward the pandemic’s finish line, he has proved himself the Secretariat of being wrong:

He has blamed the vaccines for causing spikes in severe illness, by pointing to data that actually demonstrate their safety and effectiveness.

He has blamed the vaccines for suppressing our immune systems, by misrepresenting normal immune-system behavior.

He has suggested that countries such as Israel have suffered from their early vaccine rollout, even though deaths and hospitalizations among vaccinated groups in Israel have plummeted.

He has implied that for most non-seniors, the side effects of the vaccines are worse than having COVID-19 itself—even though, according to the CDC, the pandemic has killed tens of thousands of people under 50 and the vaccines have not conclusively killed anybody.

He is a fabulist and a liar and the idea that Musk and the Republicans are using the likes of him to kill even more people is simply shocking. Actually, I take that back. It’s completely in keeping with their behavior.

Emptywheel on the Biden documents case:

As CBS first broke the story yesterday, on November 2, some Biden associates discovered around ten classified documents (including some classified TS/SCI) in files from his former offices at Penn Biden. The documents were returned the next day, NARA made a referral to the FBI, and Merrick Garland asked one of two remaining Trump US Attorney appointees to investigate the matter.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News. The roughly 10 documents are from President Biden’s vice-presidential office at the center, the sources said. CBS News has learned the FBI is also involved in the U.S. attorney’s inquiry.

[snip]

Garland assigned U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to find out how the classified material ended up at the Penn Biden Center. The review is considered a preliminary step, and the attorney general will determine whether further investigation is necessary, including potentially appointing a special counsel.

Lausch was nominated to be U.S. attorney by former President Donald Trump, and he is one of only two current Trump-era U.S. attorneys still serving. The other is Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who is leading an investigation into the president’s son, Hunter Biden.

Lausch recently briefed the attorney general and will eventually submit a final report to Garland. The review is expected to conclude soon.

The report has generated a lot of insanely bad reporting, including this article from the NYT — with four reporters bylined and two more contributing — that doesn’t even mention a key detail from a recent Alan Feuer scoop (which I wrote about here): that Beryl Howell might yet hold Trump or his lawyers in contempt for failing to return all the classified documents in his possession.

Peter Baker and his colleagues didn’t mention that recent NYT scoop, but it did see fit to quote the former President without fact check. Nor did they note that Biden is not complaining that this is under investigation, whereas Trump has never shut up about it. Indeed, a key part of Trump’s defense has been that NARA had no authority to refer the matter for investigation. So Trump’s embrace of this investigation eliminates a claim he has been relying on in his own defense.

Another amusing difference is that for the entirety of the Trump Administration, Biden continued to have clearance; Biden decided not to continue intelligence briefings for Trump shortly after he launched a coup attempt.

Some outlets, including the NYT, have managed to explain that unlike Trump, the Biden office did not refuse to give documents back — though many, like the NYT, have insane comments about why Biden and DOJ didn’t disclose an ongoing investigation when (among other things) that would violate DOJ policy.

The White House statement said that it “is cooperating” with the department but did not explain why Mr. Biden’s team waited more than two months to announce the discovery of the documents, which came a week before the midterm congressional elections when the news would have been an explosive last-minute development.

[snip]

Still, whatever the legal questions, as a matter of political reality, the discovery will make the perception of the Justice Department potentially charging Mr. Trump over his handling of the documents more challenging. As a special counsel, Mr. Smith is handling that investigation, along with one into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, under Mr. Garland’s supervision.

[snip]

“The circumstances of Biden’s possession of classified documents appear different than Trump’s, but Merrick Garland must appoint a special counsel to investigate,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017. “Merrick Garland waited too long to let us know he had opened this investigation,” he added. “To keep the confidence of the country, you need to be transparent and timely.”

But there’s something else missing from the coverage so far: it’s not even clear that the documents had been in Biden’s possession, as opposed to another of his former staffers at the Obama White House. As CBS noted, Tony Blinken was the Managing Director at the start, followed by Steve Richetti.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, was the center’s managing director in 2018. Steve Richetti, who now serves as a top White House aide to Mr. Biden, was managing director of the center in 2019.

While Blinken had already returned to the private sector by 2017, Richetti was Biden’s Chief of Staff when they left.

One thing Chicago US Attorney John Lausch has been investigating is how the documents ended up at Penn Biden.

Lau[s]ch’s review will examine, in part, how the documents got from Mr. Biden’s vice-presidential office to the Penn Biden Center.

In other words, it might not even be a Biden thing. It could be one of his staffers — and it could be a more serious issue if someone was found to have intentionally taken documents with them when they left the White House, or was using them in the interim. It could be Richetti who did it, for example (which would be one reason among many not to reveal the investigation publicly before discovering how the documents got where they were).

There will be insane reporting ahead — there already has been.

And virtually none of it will report that Trump is still suspected of hoarding classified documents.

I posted that because the media reaction to this is overwhelming. Despite the fact that the Republicans are already taking a meat-ax to the House, Brazil is on the verge of civil war, China is lying about its COVID deaths which look to be in hundreds of thousands and California is drowning, they are spending hour after hour implying that the “optics” of this shows Donald Trump should not be held liable for his stubborn refusal to return hundreds of classified documents.

Obviously, there are questions about how those documents came to be among Biden’s papers and if he did anything illegal I have no doubt that he will be arrested on the spot as soon as he leaves the White House. (Remember, as we know from all the obstruction of justice Donald Trump committed and got away with, a president can’t be indicted while in office.) AG Garland has all kinds of prosecutors looking at it but at the moment we know one thing: Biden’s people turned over the documents immediately upon discovering them and are cooperating with the DOJ in contrast to Trump who obstructed at every step of the way.

If Trump had simply returned the documents to the National Archives when they asked for them, nobody would have even known about it. All he had to do was say he didn’t pack the boxes, they were in a hurry and here they are. But he didn’t. He refused to cooperate at every step of the way, raising suspicions, almost demanding to be handed a warrant. What was he trying to hide?

Chip Roy says the House Republican majority will stop funding the Department of Homeland Security: "We're gonna do that this year" https://t.co/SE0TF6jAk7

— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) January 10, 2023

Nixing the 87,000 IRS agents tonight and conservatives are just getting started! pic.twitter.com/SfiWyOxX5j

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) January 10, 2023

Rep. Michael Waltz on the possibility of military spending cuts: "I agree with Jim Jordan that we are going to carve out woke policies out of the military … [but] if we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it's the entitlements program." pic.twitter.com/5Nhv5fel0i

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2023

Keep in mind that cutting spending is just owning the libs. They are all too stupid to have the most rudimentary understanding of what any of this means.

The good news is that they can’t accomplish any of this stuff because they only have one house of congress and if they strong arm their swing state members into voting for this loony nonsense they’ll lose their seats in 2024. Of course, they will take the debt ceiling hostage at their earliest convenience to try to blackmail the Senate and the White House into going along with this ridiculous bullshit so that will be fun. But in the end they are cutting their own throats. And America is going to “go through some things.”

Or the changing climate

Dr. Ian Malcolm : Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.

What with 6-year-olds shooting teachers and Real Americans™ vying to turn the U.S. into Syria (or Somalia), House Republicans, antivaxxers, authoritarian mobs, and climate change will have to compete to be the final straw that takes us out.

Why does their American Dream look like Syria? pic.twitter.com/qU0MLvhWfG

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) January 7, 2023

ChatGPT has received lots of gushing press recently touting the tantalizing possibilities for artificial intelligence (AI). Have these people never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, or The Lawnmower Man ?

Perhaps we as a species are too naive to survive.

Axios:

Malicious hackers are already using the flashy new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, to create new low-level cyber tools, including malware and encryption scripts, according to a recent report.

Why it matters: Security experts have been warning that OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool could help cybercriminals speed up their attacks, and it all happened fast.

Driving the news: Researchers at Check Point Research said Friday they’ve spotted malicious hackers using ChatGPT to develop basic hacking tools.

The Check Point report finds where ChatGPT has been employed recently to write file-stealing and encryption malware. “All of the afore-mentioned [encryption] code can of course be used in a benign fashion. However, this script can easily be modified to encrypt someone’s machine completely without any user interaction. For example, it can potentially turn the code into ransomware if the script and syntax problems are fixed.”

Another example spotted on New Year’s Eve involves a cybercriminal creating “a Dark Web marketplace” using ChatGPT. Plus, “several threat actors opened discussions in additional underground forums that focused on how to use ChatGPT for fraudulent schemes.”

Just wait until Russia’s Internet Research Agency gets hold of ChatGPT.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong? https://t.co/SvoBEWgnrt

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 10, 2023

Inverting the “tragedy plus time” formula

Late night comics weighed in on the Republicans’ 15-round House Speaker fight (New York Times):

“Things really started to spin out on the floor of the House. It got so out of control, I thought I was watching the Oscars.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

“Ahead of the last round of voting for House speaker, Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers appeared to charge at fellow Republican Representative Matt Gaetz. And, out of habit, Gaetz yelled ‘I’ve never even met your daughter!’” — SETH MEYERS

“That’s a face mask violation — 15 yards. It was really the most exciting hour of cable news in quite some time.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

“Oh, my God. I don’t know if men should hold political office. They’re just too emotional!” — STEPHEN COLBERT

“After 15 rounds of voting, McCarthy pulled off the impossible — he got people to watch C-SPAN for an entire week.” — JIMMY FALLON

“I can’t even imagine what McCarthy was going through. It must have felt like sitting outside Applebee’s and waiting four days for your disc to buzz.” — JIMMY FALLON

“McCarthy was like, ‘I’m just glad it didn’t go to a 16th vote. That would have been humiliating.’” — JIMMY FALLON

“We have a new, not improved, but we have a new speaker of the House.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

“They chose McCarthy the same way you choose Thai food on New Year’s Day: ‘You guys want Thai? Well, nothing else is open!’” — SETH MEYERS

Colbert reminded viewers that the U.S. is now a net insurrection exporter>

They’ve been freaking out about this issue all day:

M&M’s is launching woke ‘all-female’ packs to celebrate female empowerment and attempt to shake things up in a continued shift toward progressive branding.

Mars, M&M’s parent company, debuted the feminist candy wrappers earlier this week, exclusively featuring the company’s three female mascots: green, brown and the newly-introduced purple.

The all-female package – upside down, to show how powerful women have ‘flipped the status quo’ – will be the first time the brown and green M&Ms have been featured together since a viral tweet from 2015 sparked rumors they were a lesbian couple. 

It isn’t the first time they’ve gotten hysterical over M&Ms. Recall this:

Carlson has tackled important issues such as Elmo’s opinions on BLM, and the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss, whose books continue to be massively popular. Recently, Carlson was triggered by a redesign of the M&M cartoon characters used to market the candy.

The M&Ms are set to shift their focus, for some reason, reflecting a new era of diversity and inclusiveness, in a move that amused many Twitter users; the focus on Orange M&Ms “anxiety” proved a particularly popular joke.

Some people say M&Ms should be an escape from the the world. Not me. I love that Orange will acknowledge his anxiety. I want Blue to acknowledge his drunk driving arrest. I want Green to shout her abortion. https://t.co/ROxrBLBuZd

— aaron, a hate crime doer (@theyshootactors) January 20, 2022

Carlson, however, didn’t see the funny side; the Fox News host seemed particularly upset by the change seen in the two female M&Ms, as the green M&M has traded her knee-high boots for comfy trainers, while the brown M&M has shortened the height of her heels.

In one of the Fox News host’s most unhinged rants yet, Carlson condemned the chocolate-coated characters as “less sexy.” Carlson went on to make some odd assumptions regarding the motive of M&M’s marketing team, passionately stating:

“M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous. Until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal.”

No word yet on whether he would like to have a drink with the new purple body positive M&M who appears to have some extra chocolate. I’m going to guess no.

This is where we are folks. Have a drink.

I wrote this morning about the Democratic Senate picking up their own gavels to do some investigating and it looks like Senator Warren is already on the case:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is launching a new investigation today into the potential ramifications of the 15-week abortion ban Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced earlier this month — sending letters to five major health care organizations asking how such a law would impact both patients and providers.

The letters to the American Medical Association, American Pharmacists Association, American Hospital Association, Physicians for Reproductive Health and National Nurses United — first shared with POLITICO — ask whether the proposed restriction would hamper access to “pregnancy care (such as care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies), reproductive care (such as emergency contraception and fertility services), and any other form of health care.” Warren is asking the groups to respond by Sept. 30.

Citing “horrifying reports” from the roughly dozen states that have already imposed 15-week bans, 6-week bans, and near total bans, Warren is asking for details about what would happen if those limits were imposed at a federal level.

The investigation comes amid a broader push from Democrats to highlight the GOP’s interest in imposing national abortion restrictions ahead of the November election, where they hope to capitalize on voter anger over the fall of Roe v. Wade.

That’s what I’m talking about. This is an example of something that is both substantively important and politically advantageous. More like this please.