Music: Arooj Aftab — ‘Insaaf’
Trump and his allies move to bury Biden
Politico reports: Donald Trump’s allies are moving to capitalize on Joe Biden’s stumbles. A big-spending super PAC linked to Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson is set to spend $61 million on TV and digital ads attacking Biden, as the besieged president faces calls from within his own party to step aside following his disastrous debate performance. Preserve America will begin airing commercials later this month, timed to coincide with the start of the Summer Olympics, which is expected to draw massive…
Democrats lose ground in 6 states with election forecaster’s postdebate shift
The Hill reports: Former President Trump is gaining ground in key swing states and could threaten to take states once considered to be safe for Democrats, as President Biden struggles to regain ground after a shaky debate performance, according to a new Cook Political Report analysis Tuesday. Biden’s defiance against calls for him to leave the presidential campaign after last month’s debate have only worsened his chances in November, Cook Editor-in-Chief Amy Walter wrote. “Biden was losing pre-debate. Now, he’s…
Biden rebels in Congress see their revolt crumbling
Axios reports: Just before House Democrats’ Tuesday morning “come-to-Jesus” meeting on President Biden’s path forward, a smaller group of swing-district Democrats held what sources described as a despondent gathering with “actual tears.” Why it matters: The bloc of battleground House Democrats is one of the last firm pockets of a rapidly disintegrating movement on Capitol Hill to get Biden off the ticket. One shell-shocked lawmaker who was present at the meeting would offer only one word to characterize it: “Intense.” Another described the mood as…
Donald Trump’s 2025 vision
Molly Jong-Fast writes: Even Donald Trump doesn’t want anything to do with Project 2025—at least not publicly. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Imagine how toxic the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 must be to get disavowed by Trump, the guy who has otherwise mused about being…
U.S. officials say Russia is unlikely to take much more Ukrainian territory
The New York Times reports: Russia is unlikely to make significant territorial gains in Ukraine in the coming months as its poorly trained forces struggle to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions, U.S. officials say. Through the spring and early summer, Russian troops tried to take territory outside the city of Kharkiv and renew a push in eastern Ukraine, to capitalize on their seizure of Avdiivka. Russia has suffered thousands of casualties in the drive…
‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza
+972 magazine reports: In early June, Al Jazeera aired a series of disturbing videos revealing what it described as “summary executions”: Israeli soldiers shooting dead several Palestinians walking near the coastal road in the Gaza Strip, on three separate occasions. In each case, the Palestinians appeared unarmed and did not pose any imminent threat to the soldiers. Such footage is rare, due to the severe constraints faced by journalists in the besieged enclave and the constant danger to their lives….
Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows
The Guardian reports: The world has baked for 12 consecutive months in temperatures 1.5C (2.7F) greater than their average before the fossil fuel era, new data shows. Temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record, scientists found, creating a year-long stretch in which the Earth was 1.64C hotter than in preindustrial times. The findings do not mean world leaders have already failed to honour their promises to stop the planet heating 1.5C by the end of…
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…