Music: Arooj Aftab — ‘Man Kunto Maula’
Michael Moore: Biden’s ‘political instincts are off’
Michael Moore joins MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin to discuss Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, whether he should stay in the race, and the dangers of Donald Trump and Project 2025.
Biden’s survival plan: decry ‘elite’ critics, appeal to his base
Jonathan Martin writes: Sitting on a panel here at Essence Fest, an annual gathering of Black leaders, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) brought the crowd alive Saturday with a declaration: “It ain’t going to be no other Democratic candidate — it’s going to be Biden.” More significant may have been the private forum Waters used to defend the president a day earlier. On a conference call Friday with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the 85-year-old House veteran urged the…
Biden and his backers are falling for the sunk cost fallacy
Chitra Ragavan writes: Joe Biden’s self-inflicted electoral crisis is a classic case study in the “sunk cost fallacy.” As Vice President Kamala Harris and party leaders pour resources into the president’s flailing campaign, the argument that Biden is the only one who can defeat Donald Trump in November and “protect democracy” is increasingly falling on electoral and donor deaf ears. Coined in 1980 by economist Richard Thaler, the sunk-cost fallacy describes a cognitive bias that leads people to double down…
The president ordered a board to probe a massive Russian cyberattack. It never did
By Craig Silverman This story was originally published by ProPublica. After Russian intelligence launched one of the most devastating cyber espionage attacks in history against U.S. government agencies, the Biden administration set up a new board and tasked it to figure out what happened — and tell the public. State hackers had infiltrated SolarWinds, an American software company that serves the U.S. government and thousands of American companies. The intruders used malicious code and a flaw in a Microsoft product…
The destruction of the regulatory state is already happening
Lisa Needham writes: It’s been barely a week since conservatives on the US Supreme Court radically upended the balance of power between the branches of government, giving the federal courts the exclusive power to interpret statutes rather than deferring to agency experts. And we’re already seeing impacts on the ground. Right-wingers have been in the habit of running to their preferred courts to get regulations overturned, but the decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which officially destroyed agency deference, will…
The world wasn’t ready for Trump in 2016. It’s not making that mistake this time
Politico reports: In Brussels, NATO officials have devised a plan to lock in long-term military support for Ukraine so that a possible Trump administration can’t get in the way. In Ankara, Turkish officials have reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy road map for clues into Donald Trump’s designs on Syria. In Atlanta, Austin and Lincoln, Nebraska, top ministers from Germany and Canada have met with Republican governors to shore up relations on the American right. And in Washington, Trump’s…
What is machine learning?
John Pavlus writes: By now, many people think they know what machine learning is: You “feed” computers a bunch of “training data” so that they “learn” to do things without our having to specify exactly how. But computers aren’t dogs, data isn’t kibble, and that previous sentence has way too many air quotes. What does that stuff really mean? Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence, which explores how to computationally simulate (or surpass) humanlike intelligence. While some AI…
Music: Hanakiv — ‘Goodbye’
Rep. Adam Schiff: Joe Biden needs to seek objective advice from outside his inner circle
On NBC’s Meet the Press, Rep. Adam Schiff says Biden needs to ‘win overwhelmingly’ or ‘pass the torch.’ He praises Biden’s record while calling into question his future. David Axelrod: “It’s more likely that [Biden] will lose by a landslide than win narrowly this race, and if the stakes are as large as he says, and I believe they are, then he really needs to consider what the right thing to do here is […] The only thing that’s…
Among Biden donors ‘for every 10 people who think he should exit, one thinks he should stay’
The Washington Post reports: Billionaire donors, for all their swagger, don’t get to order a president around. But a cruel conventional wisdom is setting in. “I’d estimate that for every 10 people who think he should exit, one thinks he should stay,” said one donor adviser. The Biden campaign counters that this week was the best grass-roots fundraising start of any month during this campaign. The campaign, meanwhile, has not been able to answer the central question of their detractors….
Watching Biden, many see the heartbreaking indignities of aging
The Washington Post reports: President Biden shuffled onto the debate stage. He whispered, mumbled and repeatedly trailed off. When he wasn’t speaking, he stood slightly stooped, his mouth at times agape and his eyes flickering between apparent confusion and recognition. When his halting 90-minute 2024 debate debut was over, his wife took him by the hand, escorting him gingerly offstage. Biden’s debate performance a week and a half ago set off a swirl of political angst and upheaval in the…
Akhil Reed Amar: ‘Incoherent’ immunity decision renders ‘Constitution itself unconstitutional’
The Supreme Court this week severely undermined the principle that no one is above the law – a bedrock of our nation’s system of government – with its historic ruling declaring that presidents have absolute immunity for their official acts. In her fierce dissent, Justice Sotomayor accused the conservative majority of making the president a “king above the law.” Eminent legal scholar and one of the most cited by SCOTUS, Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar, joins Ali Velshi to discuss…
Israeli government accused of trying to sabotage Gaza ceasefire proposal
The Guardian reports: The Israeli government has been accused of attempting to sabotage a US-backed ceasefire proposal, according to Israeli media, by introducing new demands despite previously accepting the plan. Hopes for a ceasefire in Gaza had risen in recent days following reports that Hamas had given initial approval for a new proposal for a phased deal, after ninth months of war since the attack on 7 October. Egyptian officials and representatives of Hamas said the Islamist militant organisation had…
Israeli army ordered ‘Hannibal Directive’ on Oct. 7, Haaretz reports
The New Arab reports: The Israeli military ordered the “Hannibal Directive” on 7 October, according to a report in the Israeli media on Sunday. The “Hannibal Directive” is a military protocol where Israeli soldiers would kill captives and their captors to stop enemies from being able to use Israeli citizens as bargaining chips. The directive dates back to the 1980s but was revised after Hamas members abducted a soldier in 2006. While it officially does not allow soldiers to kill…
‘We were so scared’: France’s centrist and leftwing voters breathe sigh of relief
The Guardian reports: A nervous energy rippled through the crowd gathered at Lyon’s Place de la République. As the final polls closed in the most momentous election in recent memory, hundreds of people milled about, waiting to find out what would lie in store for France. Just after 8pm, Florent Martins came running through the plaza, mobile phone in hand. “We won,” the 23-year-old yelled out, his voice shaking with disbelief as those around him exploded into cheers and hearty…