Plenty needs fixing As Greg Sargent tells it: Young people have delivered unmistakable political surprises lately. They have proved decidedly progressive on many big issues. They voted at outsize rates in the last three national elections. They are fueling population growth in swing-state college towns, making Republicans nervously rethink their strategy. Now, if a group of Gen Z political operatives has its way, young people might surprise us in another fashion: by getting involved in those sleepy, unglamorous, decidedly uncool contests known as state legislative races. This week, David Hogg, the 23-year-old gun-control activist driven into politics by the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., launched a political action committee called Leaders We Deserve, which is devoted to recruiting young candidates for state legislative seats — largely in red states. “That’s where the worst bills are coming from,” Hogg says. I’m forever telling friends less engaged in day-to-day organizing to stop obsessing over the presidential race.
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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried ordered to jail Does this make your day? Daily Beast: The luck ran out for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried on Friday, when a New York judge ordered that he be confined to jail in advance of his October trial. The former billionaire had repeatedly angered both prosecutors and the court while out on bail following his arrest in December. Most recently, he leaked documents to The New York Times about his former lover Caroline Ellison, who once ran Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund and is likely to be a witness in his trial. Prosecutors framed the leaks as a possible attempt at witness tampering, both by intimidating Ellison and influencing public perception of her in the media. An assistant U.S. attorney argued in court last month that there was “no set of conditions short of detention to ensure the safety of the community.” Judge Lewis Kaplan agreed that defendant Bankman-Fried has a right to try and repair his reputation. “But I find that there is a practical possibility [leaking documents] was intended to have [witnesses] back off.” Who else wants to play chicken with the courts?
This was inevitable: Students in a Florida school district will be reading only excerpts from William Shakespeare’s plays for class rather than the full texts under redesigned curriculum guides developed, in part, to take into consideration the state’s new laws that restrict classroom materials whose content can be deemed sexual. The changes to the Hillsborough County Public Schools’ curriculum guides were made with Florida’s new legislation limiting classroom materials that “contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct” in mind. Other reasons included revised state standards and an effort to get students to read a wide variety of books for new state exams, the school district said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. Several Shakespeare plays use suggestive puns and innuendo, and it is implied that the protagonists have had premarital sex in “Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare’s books will be available for checkout at media centers at schools, said the district, which covers the Tampa area. “First and foremost, we have not excluded Shakespeare from our high school curriculum.
JV Last: The other day on Threads, Bulwark contributor and all-around great writer Nicholas Grossman asked the following question: What he’s getting at is one of the political and ideological asymmetries we talk about here often: One side of our political divide routinely castigates itself for being in a bubble. One side expends a lot of energy trying to figure out how to appeal to people who don’t vote for them. One side talks a lot about persuasion and understanding the people across from them. Not coincidentally, that side is the same side that can no longer wield executive power nationally without winning a sizable popular majority. The other side does not seem to worry about the media bubble it lives in. This side does not expend much energy trying to understand the 51 percent of the country which votes against it. Systems engineering is one of those disciplines that, once you start looking at it, shapes your perception of everything around you.
You knew it would happen: “FBI is now killing all online critics of Biden,” Ali Alexander, organizer of “Stop the Steal” protests that fueled the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, announced on his Telegram account on Wednesday. “This is all by design.” This alarming claim was prompted by the death of Craig Deleeuw Robertson, 75, in an FBI raid on his Provo, Utah residence early that morning. According to a criminal complaint from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Robertson was to be charged with interstate threats, impeding federal law enforcement officers by threat, and making threats against the president — all on the social media platforms Truth Social and Facebook. But Robertson was reportedly armed when agents showed up on his doorstep with arrest and search warrants, according to law enforcement sources who spoke to the Associated Press, and was killed by gunfire. “The FBI is reviewing an agent-involved shooting which occurred around 6:15 a.m. on Wednesday,” the agency said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone, noting that the subject of their warrants was deceased.
Yep: House and Senate Republicans on Friday ripped Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint U.S. Attorney David Weiss as the special counsel in the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden. Republicans accused Weiss of signing off on a “sweetheart deal” with the president’s son and suggested that he was appointed as special counsel to inhibit congressional investigations into the Bidens and to avoid testifying before Congress. “This action by Biden’s DOJ cannot be used to obstruct congressional investigations or whitewash the Biden family corruption,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a tweet. “If Weiss negotiated the sweetheart deal that couldn’t get approved, how can he be trusted as a Special Counsel? House Republicans will continue to pursue the facts for the American people.” Rep.
Who will step up and say so? It’s 4 a.m. Not another car in sight. No headlights in the distance. The light is red and you’re in a rush to get to the airport. You run the light. It’s against the law but there’s no one to enforce it. Is it still the law? That, essentially, is what scholars of the Constitution, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas, ponder in their paper examining Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment initially passed to prohibit Civil War participants from holding office. It reads in full: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, un-der the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
What could go worng? Again. HAL: I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. We’re here right now. Savey Meal-Bot has the greatest enthusiasm for its mission and wants to help you (Ars Technica): When given a list of harmful ingredients, an AI-powered recipe suggestion bot called the Savey Meal-Bot returned ridiculously titled dangerous recipe suggestions, reports The Guardian. The bot is a product of the New Zealand-based PAK’nSAVE grocery chain and uses the OpenAI GPT-3.5 language model to craft its recipes. PAK’nSAVE intended the bot as a way to make the best out of whatever leftover ingredients someone might have on hand. For example, if you tell the bot you have lemons, sugar, and water, it might suggest making lemonade. So a human lists the ingredients and the bot crafts a recipe from it.
If there’s one thing that drives me the most crazy about the “I don’t like his tweets but I’ll vote for him anyway” crowd is that they always extol the virtues of his allegedly successful presidency which I just do not remember. His policy success was almost nil and to the extent it just coasted on what came before. His tax bill had little to do with him and he spent most of his time reversing policies that had come from previous presidents. Still, those who want to separate themselves from the embarrassing parts of Trumpism while still supporting it always say that he was really a good president except for his personality: Chris Mudd is the hands-on founder and CEO. He checked in with the crew, made a point of thanking the homeowner for her business and then took a moment to reflect on Midwest Solar’s swift progress. “Our first 12 months I think we averaged three or four systems a month. … It was tough. Today, we are doing 15-20 systems a month,” Mudd says. “We lost money the first year we were in business and we’re going to make money our second year. I think that’s good.
She was a duly elected district attorney. And he just removed her from her post as he did another DA who said he didn’t approve of one of DeSantis’ policies. Sincle Florida is pretty much a one-party state there’s not much she can do about it: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida suspended the top state prosecutor in Orlando on Wednesday, accusing her of incompetence and neglect of duty for what he characterized as lenience against violent criminals. The move was the governor’s latest aggressive use of executive power against local officials of the opposing political party. Mr. DeSantis suspended Monique H. Worrell, the elected state attorney of Florida’s Ninth Judicial Circuit, which includes Orange and Osceola Counties, and cited as reasons her handling of three cases and a low overall incarceration rate, among other things. One of the three cases involved a man who shot and injured two Orlando police officers over the weekend. It is the second time in a year that Mr. DeSantis, a Republican running for president, has taken the drastic and exceedingly rare step of removing an elected state attorney. Both have been Democrats. Mr.