Donald Trump wants to give it a little more control. Bernie Sanders wants to give it a lot.
The show's new leader says he fired star Scott Pelley for insubordination. Pelley says he was defending the integrity of the show's journalism after three top executives and two reporters were fired.
According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, the Iran war “debacle” has “clearly broken” President Donald Trump, and as a result, the commander-in-chief has “given up governing” to focus exclusively on his true priorities: “rage and revenge.”The latest evidence of this is tthat Trump has tapped Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a role that is vital to the country’s national security apparatus. As Krugamn writes, “The word ‘acting’ is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee ‘shall have extensive national security expertise.’” Pulte has none. A home building baron and current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he has zero background in intelligence. “But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment,” says Krugman. “For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.”Part of what brought Pulte into Trump’s orbit where the “thousands of nasty political posts” he spewed onto social media in recent years. His family’s background in residential construction garnered him an appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but according to Krugman, “His real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte confected false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to politicize monetary policy.”That Pulte has turned out to be a “bumbling hatchet man” whose efforts have been entirely ineffective is besides the point, says Krugman. “For Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.”Even so, Krugman expresses surprise that Trump would select someone with such vanishing experience considering the fact that, at the very least, the president “sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes,” and to that end, one would think he’d want accurate intelligence. “But Trump appears to have given up on governing,” asserts Krugman, “even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.”While Krugman warns that the Republican Party and its megadonors are still working hard to corrupt American democracy, dismantle the country’s scientific community, and consolidate power for billionaires, he concludes that “Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.”
Sanders' plan would impose a one-time tax of 50 percent of AI companies' stock and give the government voting shares and the power to block corporate decisions.
We continue our coverage of the fallout from the dropped federal case against the “Broadview 6,” six people who attended a protest outside Chicago’s Broadview ICE jail in September. They were later indicted for conspiracy to impede a federal agent, despite many not having met prior to appearing together in court. “I didn’t find out that I had been indicted until a month after this happened,” says Kat Abughazaleh, who was not arrested at the protest, but weeks later, as she was running for Congress. Michael Rabbitt, a Democratic ward committeeperson in Chicago, says that when he received a text informing him about a warrant for his arrest, “I actually thought it was a scam. I honestly didn’t think it was real.”
Plus: the Democratic Party's candidate problem, property tax breaks for seniors, and the UFC on the White House lawn
When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) first started his war on artificial intelligence and robotics, his excuse was that the technologies would destroy jobs of the working class at the behest of the “oligarchs,” which is to say billionaire entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman. He wanted to put a stop to the technology, […]
Proposition 50 has created a handful of key races where Democrats will choose candidates to pit against vulnerable Republican incumbents. Generational challenges have infused other contests.
A federal appeals court sharply questioned lawyers for the city of Philadelphia on Tuesday over their lawsuit seeking to restore a slavery exhibit to the President’s House site in the city, which is operated by the federal government. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit heard arguments in a […]