Wonder why?
Magadonian sounds more like a plump dinosaur than a macho Star Wars character, if that’s what Trump was going for. Pretty chunky. Probably has a “very, very large brain.”
And very, very large on the other end.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
The virulent grow more virulent
Throw “government closest to the people serves the people best” on the ashheap of history. Old-school conservatives may once have spouted that line, but MAGA authoritarians treat local democracy as quaint. Like the Geneva Convention that way.
The New York Times Editorial Board comments on the trend among Republican-led state legislatures to put their thumbs on local democracies that buck the MAGA-red tide. For example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will sign within day a bill stripping Texas cities of their power to govern themselves:
The bill, recently approved by the Texas House and Senate, would nullify any city ordinance or regulation that conflicts with existing state policy in those crucial areas, and would give private citizens or businesses the right to sue and seek damages if they believe there is a discrepancy between city and state. That means no city could prohibit discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. employees, as several Texas cities have done. No city could adopt new rules to limit predatory payday-lending practices. No city could restrict overgrown lots, or unsafe festivals, or inadequate waste storage. Cities would even be banned from enacting local worker protections, including requiring water breaks for laborers in the Texas heat, as Dallas, Austin and other cities have done following multiple deaths and injuries.
The bill, the Board explains, “is the latest effort by Republicans to rid the state of any policies that conflict with their hard-right agenda — even if those policies are fully supported by voters in those cities, who elect representatives to serve their interests.”
Preemption, as it’s called, ” is the use of state law to nullify a municipal ordinance or authority.”
By reducing the right of localities to make their own decisions, Texas has joined dozens of other states that have asserted their dominance over cities in recent years through a practice known as state pre-emption. One watchdog group has counted more than 650 pre-emption bills in state legislatures this year; the large majority have been introduced by Republican lawmakers to curb policymaking in cities run by Democrats.
[…]
Many of the recent bills are particularly brazen in their disdain for local decision-making. The Florida Legislature passed a bill in early May allowing businesses to challenge municipal ordinances in court simply for being “unreasonable.” If they win, the businesses can collect $50,000 in attorney fees from the taxpayers if the ordinance is not withdrawn, but cities can’t collect attorney fees if they win. In Tennessee, Republicans were angry that leaders in Nashville blocked a bid to host the 2024 G.O.P. convention, so they passed a bill to shrink the size of the Nashville Metro Council and upend its voting district maps, which many residents say will dilute the political strength of minority groups. A local court put that law on hold for now, but the final outcome has not been determined.
Whether it be the rules regarding the conduct of elections, law enforcement, gun laws, or local ordinances against discrimination, those that clash with the hard-right imperatives of the “MAGA core within the Republican Party” are targets for preemption.
To clarify, the MAGA core predates MAGA. We saw similar behavior before under Republicans Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Gov. Rick Snyder in Michigan. Hard-right antipathy toward democracy is not new, only more virulent.
Meerkat pups! (Should be Meerkat cubs, no? Kittens? )
For the first time in 16 years, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) in Washington, D.C., is celebrating the birth of three meerkats. Keepers in the Small Mammal House reported for duty the morning of May 10 and observed that 5-year-old Sadie had given birth overnight. NZCBI had received a recommendation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan (SSP) to breed Sadie and the pups’ 6-year-old father Frankie. These pups are the first offspring for Sadie; Frankie sired offspring previously at his former zoo. Meerkats live in groups called mobs that can include as many as 30 individuals, although the average mob size is around 10 to 15 individuals. Visitors can view NZCBI’s meerkat mob—which also includes Sadie’s sister, Stella—at the Small Mammal House.
In the wild, meerkat pups typically remain in an underground burrow for about three weeks. To encourage the meerkats to exhibit their natural burrowing behavior, a system of tubing—concealed within rockwork—runs along the outskirts of their habitat in the Small Mammal House. At the end of the tunnel, a nest box offers visitors a view of the meerkats’ underground sleeping chamber. The day Sadie gave birth, she surprised keepers by bringing her pups into the main exhibit space.
Animal care staff are leaving the mob to bond with and care for the pups without interference. They are closely monitoring the family and have observed Sadie nursing her offspring, which appear to be healthy and strong. Because keepers and veterinarians are not handling the pups, it may be some time before they can determine their sexes. Now 14 days old, the pups are starting to open their eyes and explore their habitat.
I don’t know how many of you watched Meerkat Manor, but I will never get over the loss of Shakespeare.
Nice of him to stipulate that we shouldn’t be “cruel to those who don’t fit the norm.” But I hate to tell him — being cruel to anyone who didn’t perfectly fit was the norm until recently when humans finally decided that allowing people to celebrate their communities and identities should be the new norm. That’s called modern civilization and these throwbacks can’t stand to see it.
Any of you who are older than 40 or so (and probably a few who are younger as well) are very well aware of the the “norm” among kids and adults alike to discriminate, isolate, degrade, insult and batter LGBTQ people. Among some, it still is. These people who are threatening store clerks at Target over Pride merch are not so subtly signalling that they plan to bring back that “norm.”
Don’t kid yourself, they aren’t just trying to “protect” trans kids. Going after Pride proves that. They want all LGBTQ people back in the closet with the door nailed shut. They always have.
And there are a whole lot of Republicans who have gay relatives. Quite a few are gay themselves. Maybe they can disgracefully delude themselves at the moment that this is just about transgender children but they’d better open their eyes. The bigots are coming for them too.
This piece by Tim Alberta about CNN’s Chris Licht is very illuminating. And it shows, once again, that these big shot media moguls are just fine with criticism from the right — they expect it. But they get enraged when it comes from the left. And they react very badly:
The new boss told people inside CNN that Tapper’s 4 o’clock show, The Lead, was the model: tough, respectful, inquisitive reporting that challenged every conceivable view and facilitated open dialogue.
Licht emphasized certain exceptions to this approach. He would not give airtime to bad actors who spread disinformation. His network would host people who like rain as well as people who don’t like rain. But, he said, CNN would not host people who deny that it’s raining when it is. This was no small caveat: More than half of Republicans in Congress had voted to throw out the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania based on lies. Meanwhile, plenty of Republicans who weren’t election deniers didn’t want to come on CNN anyway. Sensing this predicament, Licht had traveled to Capitol Hill early in his tenure, meeting with Republican leaders and promising them a fair shake under his leadership.
What Licht viewed as a diplomatic visit, his skeptics portrayed as an apology tour. The narrative taking hold in elite media circles—that CNN’s new boss was a scheming, ruthless Roger Ailes wannabe—went into overdrive. Licht was amused at first. But he soon lost his sense of humor. He called Robert Reich and rebuked him after the former labor secretary wrote a Substack post criticizing CNN. He vowed to friends that he would “destroy” Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, for a disparaging Los Angeles Times column. Licht seethed about what he saw as a coordinated attack from liberals who feared long-overdue journalistic scrutiny of their ideals.
“You have a certain segment of society that has had an unfettered megaphone to the leading journalistic organization in the world,” he said. “And at the slightest hint that that organization may not be just taking things that are fed to them from that segment of the population, it must be that a fascist is running the network and he wants to move it to the right … The fact that I want to give space to the [argument] that this thing everyone agrees with might be not right doesn’t make me a fascist right-winger who’s trying to steal Fox viewers.”
…”fed to them from that segment of the population.” Clearly criticism of Trump and the GOP’s usurpation of democracy is “feeding” propaganda to the media. Because he isn’t a fascist, goddamnit! He isn’t!
He sounds like Elon Musk.
And this is just painful:
Much of this angst at CNN, Licht argued, stemmed from skepticism about whether his vision would succeed in bringing back viewers. He acknowledged that it very well might not—or, at least, that it might take a long time. Licht was visibly bothered whenever someone brought up the network’s bad ratings. But, he assured me, David Zaslav cared more about other metrics. Success would be measured differently at CNN than it had been in the past. “This is a reputational asset for the company. It is not a profit-growth driver,” Licht said.
I asked him to define “reputational asset” in the context of an enormous, publicly traded, for-profit corporation.
“CNN, for Warner Bros. Discovery, is a reputational asset,” he said, emphasizing the phrase. “My boss believes that a strong CNN is good for the world and important to the portfolio.”
Even if it’s not making nearly the money it once did?
“So I’m told,” he said.
This sentiment struck me as particularly guileless coming from a newsman. Whatever Zaslav’s worldview, steering CNN toward the center was a business decision. In an age of fragmented media, Zaslav was convinced by Licht, among others, that broadening the network’s appeal to reach an exhausted majority of news consumers was good for the bottom line (and, perhaps as a bonus, good for America). It’s unclear whether Zaslav still believes that model is viable. There had been doubts from day one as to whether Warner Bros. Discovery planned to keep CNN; plenty of industry insiders believed Zaslav’s plan was to stabilize the network, cut costs to stop the bleeding of revenue, then flip it for a gain.
In any event, the health of CNN’s business was but one source of anxiety. I told Licht—based on my conversations with his employees, as well as the questioning from Cornish earlier in the day—that there seemed to be even greater insecurity about the journalistic ethos itself. When he’d warned Cornish about taking a “condescending tone” toward Republicans, surely it sounded to some reporters like he wanted them to coddle the crazy right-wingers who would use their platform to destabilize the country’s democratic institutions.
Licht looked annoyed. “We are not an advocacy network. And if you want to work for an advocacy network, there are other places to go,” he told me. “You can find any flavor of advocacy in a news organization that suits your need. We are providing something different. And when the shit hits the fan in this world, you’re not gonna have time for that advocacy anymore. You need an unbiased source of truth.”
I told him that some journalists, myself included, believe that truth itself needs to be advocated for.
“No one is suggesting in any way that we shy away from the truth,” he replied.
Of course they want CNN to make money and that is why they are pushing them to go right because they think that’s where the ratings — and the profits — are to be found. It’s stupid because there is a glut of right wing media already and MSNBC is taking all the normies and the liberals so I don’t know who this audience of wishy-washy, non-partisan, news audience that doesn’t need to know that right wingers are lying sacks of shit is.
He wants to tell the truth? It’s easy. The right wing is trying to destroy democracy and usher in authoritarian rule, period. Here’s what the new “it boy” of the Republican Party is saying openly on the campaign trail:
“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history.”
He’s banning books fergawdsakes. And Licht is whining about liberals being upset that one of the major networks has decided that getting to the “truth” means that it’s important to make nice with the authoritarians. It’s ludicrous.
Here’s the Elon factor again:
Licht emphasized that although he would show employees grace for certain missteps, he had no tolerance for efforts to chill reporting on controversial topics. He noted that Zucker, fearing the COVID-19 “lab-leak theory” was a xenophobic gambit that endangered Asian Americans, had essentially banned discussion of the topic on the air. This was not dissimilar, Licht suggested, to the surgeon general of the United States telling citizens at the beginning of the pandemic that wearing masks wouldn’t help them—not because it was a fact, but because the government wanted to prevent a run on the masks needed for first responders.
He goes on and on about COVID and it’s enough to make you lose your lunch. He’s one step away from saying that anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers had a point. Leter in the piece he says:
Right on cue, one of Luntz’s students asked Licht about the trap of false equivalency. She seemed less interested in litigating the respective crimes of Fox News and MSNBC—though that played into her question—and more concerned with Licht’s overall attitude toward the news. There is, she reminded him, “one truth” on some fundamental questions facing the country. Trump had lost the 2020 election; Barack Obama had been born in the United States; we know how many deaths have been caused by COVID.
Licht pounced. “Wait a second. We don’t know how many deaths there were from COVID,” he said.
She frowned at him.
“No, really, we don’t,” Licht said. As the son of a doctor, he believed there were “legitimate conversations” to be had about the death toll attached to COVID-19. Perhaps some patients had been admitted to hospitals with life-threatening illnesses before the pandemic began, then died with a positive diagnosis, Licht postulated. “Where we run into trouble is when you say, ‘No. Come on. We’re not even having that conversation,’” he told the students. “That goes to trust as much as anything else. If you’re solid on your facts, then you should be able to entertain that discussion.”
He’s just asking questions, you see.
The head of CNN is a conspiracy theorist.
We were in the middle of a fucking pandemic, society was crumbling and nobody knew how many people were going to drop dead! Everything was in flux, nurses were wearing fucking garbage bags because there wasn’t enough PPE! And this is what Licht is using this as an example of how CNN failed to tell the truth? Please. It was an emergency and everyone was scrambling in those early days to try to contain the fallout.
And as you no doubt already know, this is patented right wing bullshit and he’s listening to it because the liberals hurt his feefees. It always ends up like this. Right wingers can call them every name in the book but the liberals are required to treat them like little princes or it’s time to go to the mattresses against the left.
I mean:
Licht argued that the media’s blind spots owe to a lack of diversity—and not the lack of diversity that he sees newsrooms obsessing over. He wants to recruit reporters who are deeply religious and reporters who grew up on food stamps and reporters who own guns. Licht recalled a recent dustup with his own diversity, equity, and inclusion staff after making some spicy remarks at a conference. “I said, ‘A Black person, a brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity,’” he told me.
A minute later—after noting how sharing that anecdote could get him in trouble, and pausing to consider what he would say next—Licht added: “I think ‘Defund the police’ would’ve been covered differently if newsrooms were filled with people who had lived in public housing.” I asked him why. “They have a different relationship with their need with the police,” he said.
Right.It’s pretty clear what he meant the first time.
“Chris was absolutely, positively, without question the right choice for CNN,” the teacher told his students, motioning toward the man seated in front of them. “There is nothing more important in America today than trust. I’m praying that Chris is successful. I want him to have this job for 10 years. Because anything less than 10 years will not give him the opportunity to make the most important changes to the most important news source on the face of the Earth. I have every faith that he will succeed, and every fear for this country if he doesn’t.”
He turned to face Licht. The teacher’s eyes were watery. His voice was choked with emotion. “My hopes and dreams are embodied in you,” he said.
This was quite an introduction, especially considering the man who gave it: Frank Luntz.
I think that says it all.
CNN is probably doomed to end up as a watered down Fox news whether Licht stays or not and it’s not looking good for him. Because despite his assertions to the contrary, that is the mission of the board of directors of Discovery-Time Warner and that’s the way it’s going to be. At the end of the article Alberta makes it sound as if Licht is doing all he’s doing to placate David Zasloff his right wing corporate boss. The Frank Luntz connection contradicts that. Licht and Zasloff are on the same page.
It’s pathetic, but at least CNN helped us through the Trump administration and, God willing, there won’t be another one. God help us all if there is.
Grab some popcorn and sit down for a very entertaining read from Hugo Lowell at The Guardian.
The turmoil inside the legal team only exploded into public view when one of the top lawyers, Tim Parlatore, abruptly resigned two weeks ago from the representation citing irreconcilable differences with Trump’s senior adviser and in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn.
But the departure of Parlatore was the culmination of months of simmering tensions that continue to threaten the effectiveness of the legal team at a crucial time – as federal prosecutors weigh criminal charges – in part because the interpersonal conflicts remain largely unresolved.
It also comes as multiple Trump lawyers are embroiled in numerous criminal investigations targeting the former president: Epshteyn was recently interviewed by the special counsel, while Parlatore and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran testified to the grand jury in the classified documents inquiry.
The turmoil has revolved around hostility among the lawyers on the legal team who have come to distrust each other as well as their hostility directed at Epshteyn, over what they regard as his oversight of the legal work and gatekeeping direct access to the former president.
In one instance, the clashes became so acute that some of the lawyers agreed to a so-called “murder-suicide” pact where if Parlatore got fired, others would resign in solidarity. And as some of the lawyers tried to exclude Epshteyn, they withheld information from co-counsel who they suspected might brief him.
The infighting eventually reached the point at which some of the lawyers started to believe the biggest impediment to defending Trump might just be the distrust and interpersonal conflict, rather than someone like Parlatore deciding to cooperate with prosecutors.
In fact, the legal team is said to be confident that Parlatore will not flip on Trump after he told the grand jury hearing evidence in the case last year that Trump gave him free rein to search for any remaining documents at his properties last year, according to a transcript of his testimony.
But an eventual attempt to remove Epshteyn from the case ended in failure, and Epshteyn remains a trusted member of Trump’s inner circle. The months of worsening relations that led to that moment were described to the Guardian by six people familiar with the situation.
[…]
Palm Beach dinner foreshadows divisiveness
The animosity inside the Trump legal team started almost immediately after the FBI seized 101 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago last August, when Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to appoint a special master to review the materials for any privilege protections.
The legal team, at the time, was composed of the former federal prosecutors Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran – whose search for classified documents in response to a subpoena later proved incomplete – the former Florida solicitor general Chris Kise and the lawyer Lindsey Halligan.
The lawyers presented a united front as they argued to the US district court judge Aileen Cannon that she should grant a special master, which she did – a strategic win for Trump that enabled him to delay the criminal investigation and prosecutors’ ability to review the documents.
But Trusty, who played a leading role in the special master litigation, was already frustrated with how things were going.
Trusty’s private frame of mind emerged over dinner with Halligan and Corcoran at the five-star Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, hours after the special master court hearing. The conversation was overheard by this Guardian reporter who happened to be sitting at the table next to them.
They were sitting next to Hugo Lowell while they were blabbing in a public place? How many times is this going to happen with Trump’s lawyers? Remember that Ty Cobb was overheard by a reporter in a different restaurant in DC. What big mouths they all are.
Trusty’s main irritation with Epshteyn, as he recounted, was having to run his legal decisions by him even though he did not consider him a trial lawyer and objected to how, in his eyes, he gave more priority to Trump’s perceived PR problems than to genuine legal problems.
He criticised Epshteyn for trying to “troubleshoot” those problems before they could reach Trump, instead of allowing him to straightforwardly brief the former president himself. The entire situation meant the lawyers were having to play “a game of thrones nonsense” that he found distracting.
Trusty then discussed legal strategy, suggesting Kise was “too apologetic” in opening remarks to the judge and questioned the validity of the FBI warrant for Mar-a-Lago. He also said he had no interest in talking to reporters from the publication Lawfare or the New York Times on account of their coverage.
Read on for the full catastrophe. These are supposed to be top lawyers defending the former president of the United States and putative head of the Republican Party. They are a mess, just like their client.
The problem, of course, is that Trump is likely to win the nomination even if he’s under indictment. But it’s going to be a shitshow in any case.
Well, it appears the House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has survived the tantrum from the right wing Freedom Caucus members after he made a deal with Joe Biden that essentially won none of their priorities and pushed off their next hostage opportunity until 2025. They weren’t happy but they were anxious to get back to screeching about “wokeness”, attacking the “Deep State” and pretending to do investigations into Joe Biden so they let it slide.
With that saga ending with a whimper not a bang, it’s time to rejoin the Republican presidential primary clown car. Both front runner former President Donald Trump and his chief rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were both in Iowa this week wooing the midwestern white conservatives who are the supposed avatars of Real America. Appearing before small intimate crowds isn’t either man’s strong suit but it’s an important rite of passage that even Donald Trump can’t entirely escape.
He takes a lot of pictures with fans at Mar-a-Lago but they’ve paid an admission fee. Trump famously made his feelings known back in 2016 when he told a reporter:
Don’t forget that when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did big rallies, 3-4-5K people would come . . . and they said, “Wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go to people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.” I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living room they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird.
Speaking of weird, Ron DeSantis has been trying his best to act like a human but it’s obviously very difficult for him:
People are wondering why he pronounces his last name in two different ways (sometimes it’s Dee-Santis and sometimes it’s Duh-Santis) and that makes him testy as well:
That’s very cute but it doesn’t address the question as to why he would do something so odd. The man’s reputation for being just plain weird grows stronger by the day.
There was some substance, if you want to call it that, at the various events the two men attended. DeSantis touted his record in Florida while Trump touted his alleged 40 point lead in the state and told those gathered at the Westside Conservative Club of Urbandale, “I got China to give them for their farmers $28 billion, and a lot of people in this room, you got checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” (That is a lie, of course. US consumers paid for the tariffs on Chinese goods and US taxpayers bailed out the farmers for the Chinese retaliation.)
Later he had a bigger town hall crowd with Fox News celebrity Sean Hannity in which he claimed he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours by making them sit down together and refuted DeSantis’ contention that it will take 8 years to destroy woke leftism by promising to turn the country around in six months. (Presumably it will be right after he enacts his health care plan that he promised was coming in two weeks back in 2020.)
The crowd was very excited:
DeSantis has begun to attack Trump to reporters while continuing to only refer to him obliquely in his speeches. He complains that he didn’t fire Dr. Anthony Fauci during the pandemic as part of his dishonest account of his superior COVID performance (Trump didn’t have the power to fire him) and hits him for not closing the border. Trump, on the other hand, attacks and insults in the usual way but he is saying a few things that deviate from the standard right wing line, just as he did in 2016.
For instance:
He used the term himself just a few hours later discussing the military, but it’s clear he went after DeSantis for his “woke” crusade because polling shows that most people think of “woke” as a positive term. He took credit for the COVID vaccine when one of the people in the crowd complained about the “jab” saying “there’s a big portion of the country that thinks they are a great thing.” He’s also hedging on abortion in ways that are very dicey, especially with the Iowa GOP which is heavily Evangelical. But he’s looking ahead to the general election knowing that abortion bans like the one DeSantis signed in Florida are deadly for the Republican Party.
You’ll recall that Trump did this in 2016, staking out a few positions to the left of the conservative base, most significantly his promise to protect Social security and medicare from cuts which had been bedrock right wing principles for decades. It’s part of what made him different and appealing.
Axios reported that Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio has been making the case that DeSantis is unelectable because of his hard right policies and Trump is clearly listening to him. Fabrizio says that they’ve done surveys which show that when people in swing states hear what he’s been up to, his support craters.
It’s not just the 6 week abortion ban and the fight with Disney, which are “electorally fatal.” It’s also DeSantis’ past support for cutting SS/Medicare and enacting a national sales tax as well as the book banning. Whether Trump can thread the needle on all of that is up in the air. He’s been on all sides of the Disney thing and his rhetoric on abortion is satisfying no one. But it’s clear that he’s going to go after DeSantis’ record on these issues one way or the other. His Super Pac is already running ads on his votes to cut Social Security.
DeSantis seems to think he has the slam dunk electability argument with his exhortations to put an end to the “culture of losing,” suggesting in so many words that Trump is a loser who has run the GOP into the ground. He’s right about that but he doesn’t seem to realize that Republican voters are convinced otherwise. On Tuesday Monmouth released a poll showing that almost two-thirds of Republicans think Trump is best positioned to beat Biden.
And why wouldn’t they? They believe that Trump won the last election in a landslide and the Democrats stole it from him! Until Ron DeSantis and the rest of the field are willing to admit that Trump’s contention that he actually won the election was a big lie, this attack is going to not only fall flat, it’s going to offend the very voters to whom they are trying to appeal.
This rivalry is probably not going to last very long. DeSantis may pull out a win in Iowa but the political graveyard is full of candidates who won the state and were never heard from again so that’s not going to tell the tale. The fact is that there are just too many Republicans who are still in love with Donald Trump and unless something catastrophic happens it’s going to be almost impossible to beat him. Certainly, an uncharismatic grouch who pronounces his own name differently every other day is highly unlikely to do it.
You be the judge
All of cable news is saying that DeSantis is out of his corner and taking it to Trump. Ok. We’ll see.
But he’s still battling the weirdness factor. And this is definitely weird.
Some presidential candidates struggle to nail their message. Ron DeSantis is struggling to nail his NAME. In the early days of his campaign, DeSantis has gone back and forth between pronouncing his name Dee-Santis and Deh-Santis.
Why it matters: DeSantis’ dissonance on how to say his name — for years an issue of confusion for his campaign teams — is a curiosity as many GOP leaders and donors wonder whether the Florida governor is ready for the scrutiny of a presidential campaign.
What’s happening: During his first week as a candidate, DeSantis pronounced his name “Dee-Santis” during:
The video announcing his presidential campaign.
A radio interview in South Carolina, in which he told listeners to go to “RonDee-Santis.com.”
But then: DeSantis pronounced it “Deh-Santis” during interviews with Fox News, Glenn Beck, Erick Erickson, and Mark Levin this past week.
The governor’s campaign, his wife, Casey, and the independent super PAC that supports him consistently pronounce it “Deh-Santis.”
Asked the proper way to pronounce his name, DeSantis’ campaign did not answer. The super PAC, Never Back Down, declined to say.
Former President Trump has chided DeSantis over the different pronunciations.
“Ron DeSantis is a phony who can’t decide how to pronounce his name,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Axios. “If you can’t get your name right, how can you lead a country?”
Flashback: Early in his political career, DeSantis, 44, appeared to use “Dee-Santis” more often — then began a slow and still-incomplete evolution to “Deh-Santis.”
During the 2018 race for Florida governor, the candidate and his wife pronounced his name differently in his television ads: He said “Dee-Santis” in his first TV spot, and she said “Deh-Santis” in another.
When a reporter noted the differences, a campaign spokesperson at the time said the candidate “prefers ‘Dee-Santis.’ “
The dueling pronunciations have tripped up others. When DeSantis was sworn in for his second term as governor in January, Florida’s chief justice pronounced his name “Dee-Santis” — and the governor repeated back, “Deh-Santis.”
What they’re saying: Professor William Connell, chair of Italian Studies at Seton Hall University, told Axios that it’s common for Italian Americans such as DeSantis to change the pronunciation of their name from the original Italian to a more anglicized version — but that “Dee-Santis” surprised him.
” ‘Day-Sahn-tees’ would be proper Italian, but sloughing it off as ‘Deh-Santis’ is common,” he said. “But ‘Dee-Santis’ is unusual because that would be spelled ‘DiSantis’ in Italian.”
Fellow Italian-American politician and former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, told Axios that many fellow politicians adopt the “deh” pronunciation or have something between “day” and “deh.”
In a phone call from Italy, where he was traveling, de Blasio said DeSantis’ shifts were “just a really weird thing to change at the last minute.”
“People flip-flop and change their positions on things, but how you say your name is not one of them. It’s not negotiable!”
He’s got a point…
I find this inexplicably bizarre. He’s 44 years old, he’s running for president and he hasn’t decided how to say his name? What???
“Liberal bias” press grades Republicans on a curve
Dan Pfeiffer is steamed over press coverage of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s avoiding the ” first-ever default in U.S. history” and “a potential global financial collapse.” The press, Pfeiffer complains, is “treating the passage of this basic bill as a significant accomplishment for McCarthy.” He provides a few examples and responds:
Everyone, go take a cold shower. McCarthy did the bare minimum required and didn’t get fired (yet) in the process. If folks want to say McCarthy exceeded historically low expectations, fine; but treating him as some conquering hero or the second coming of Lyndon Baines Johnson is ridiculously over the top.
The way the media treats McCarthy is part of the broader and very annoying habit of grading Republicans on a curve. The GOP gets participation trophies from the press, while Democrats are often held to much higher standards.
It’s true. And that stance is not limited to the press. More-progressive-than-thou (MPTT) activists can be brutal in their denunications of Democratic allies when they feel disappointed. It’s “you always hurt the one you love” behavior. Having no expectations for Republicans, condemning them is de rigueur. MPTTs demand more from Democrats and condemn failure to fully live up to their potential as a jilting (or as evidence they are closet conservatives).
The press is not so reflexively critical of Democrats, but neither are reporters as quick to credit them as they are to spotlight not-awfulness on the right:
The McCarthy coverage is an egregious example of a trend in the political media. They grade Republicans on a curve while holding Democrats to a different, higher standard. Perhaps, you remember the many, many times during the Trump era when the press celebrated a newly disciplined or strategic Trump simply because he went ten days without committing a crime in public or tweeting hate speech. Other Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, received a Profiles in Courage award for being slightly less bad than Trump. Doing anything other than lighting the government on fire is seen as a substantive achievement.
Grading the GOP on a curve is endemic to longstanding journalistic cultural mores.
Press critic Dan Froomkin reminds us of that day after day.
Pfeiffer continues:
First, political media prizes balance over accuracy. They would rather be seen as “objective” and “non-partisan” than correctly detail what is happening in politics. In a world where the Republicans cavort with Nazis, enable Trump’s crimes, lie with impunity, and generally enjoy watching the world burn, the media has to go out of its way to say nice things about Republicans. In those instances, they tend to compensate to prove their bona fides as balanced reporters.
Second, the media has fully internalized the idea that the modern GOP is radical and reckless. Therefore, they price that assumption into the baseline when judging their conduct.
When Republicans act profanely and cruelly, it’s dog-bites-man. But, says Pfeiffer, “if a Democrat does something that might possibly be seen as uncivil or irresponsible, the press goes after them whole hog.”
The Senate passed H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, Thursday night. It goes now to President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature. Republican arsonists will be teeing up their next opportunity to set the country on fire.
Air Force denies AI “killed” operators in simulation
The Royal Aeronautical Society last week concluded its annual summit in London. The meetup included “just under 70 speakers and 200+ delegates from the armed services industry, academia and the media from around the world to discuss and debate the future size and shape of tomorrow’s combat air and space capabilities.”
Among other cheery tech news, under the subhead, “AI – is Skynet here already?“, one Col. Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, U.S. Air Force Chief of AI Test and Operations, discussed “the benefits and hazards in more autonomous weapon systems.” He’s been involved in developing autonomous control systems for F-16s that have successfully defeated a human adversary in five simulated dogfights.
Hamilton cautioned that adolescent AI remains too easy to trick and deceive. His testers observed, however, that AI “also creates highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” the Society’s summary reports:
He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
This example, seemingly plucked from a science fiction thriller, mean [sic] that: “You can’t have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you’re not going to talk about ethics and AI” said Hamilton.
Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek subsequently denied to Insider that the Air Force has conducted such simulations.
“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” Stefanek said. “It appears the colonel’s comments were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”
All is well. Anything else?
Vice adds:
What Hamilton is describing is essentially a worst-case scenario AI “alignment” problem many people are familiar with from the “Paperclip Maximizer” thought experiment, in which an AI will take unexpected and harmful action when instructed to pursue a certain goal. The Paperclip Maximizer was first proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. He asks us to imagine a very powerful AI which has been instructed only to manufacture as many paperclips as possible. Naturally, it will devote all its available resources to this task, but then it will seek more resources. It will beg, cheat, lie or steal to increase its own ability to make paperclips—and anyone who impedes that process will be removed.
More recently, a researcher affiliated with Google Deepmind co-authored a paper that proposed a similar situation to the USAF’s rogue AI-enabled drone simulation. The researchers concluded a world-ending catastrophe was “likely” if a rogue AI were to come up with unintended strategies to achieve a given goal, including “[eliminating] potential threats” and “[using] all available energy.”
Anecdotally, AI’ll be back.
Until then, something has to be done about drag queens, huh?