Time is running out on today’s BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Among the many clock-ticking stories covered today…
- The contract for film and television writers ran out as of midnight last night. Today, 11,500 union members in the Writers Guild of America went on strike. The late-night comedy shows have already been shut down and, sadly, Americans are likely to be less well-informed because of it. We explain.
- The deadline for how long Republicans can hold the nation and world economy hostage to ill-considered, self-destructive extremist idiocy — before blowing everything up and creating a first-ever default of the U.S. Government in the process — got much closer as of Monday. The new earliest date for when the U.S. Government may run out of authority to borrow the funds needed to pay for stuff that Republicans and Democrats alike long ago committed to paying for is now June 1, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Yet, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his band of reckless Republicans in Congress continue to exploit our dumb debt limit law to try and extort huge cuts to food and health care to millions of Americans (including veterans) along with a rollback of critical climate crisis initiatives in exchange for not destroying the nation’s economy.
President Biden is right not to negotiate with terrorists on this matter. The way the media covers this mess, however, will make a big difference in whether or not Biden’s able to continue to do the right thing. In the meantime, we sure do hope he has a plan to handle the worst-case scenario that today’s gerrymandered, death-wish GOPers may actually be dumb enough to cause for the first time in U.S. history.
- Not all Republicans have a death wish, apparently. On the same day last week, in two different “red” states, South Carolina and Nebraska, a handful of Republican state lawmakers voted to protect abortion rights. For now. It took the only two female Republican state Senators in South Carolina and one 80-year old Republican in Nebraska to block complete bans on reproductive freedoms. We’ll see how long that lasts and/or if any other GOPers can figure out why they keep losing elections that they should have won after the corrupt U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
- Back in February we covered the news from Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey that the Donald Trump‘s Campaign paid $600,000 to a research firm to investigate every single potential claim of fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. They found absolutely nothing and told Trump as much in December of that year. Nonetheless, on January 6, 2021, Trump went out and lied yet again to his supporters about fraud in the election, even though he was told all such claims were baseless. And now, Dawsey reports, a second firm was paid $750,000 by the Trump Campaign at the same time to also find no evidence of fraud. That firm told him as well, in advance of January 6. Special Counsel Jack Smith has now reportedly subpoenaed records and testimony from both firms, as he probes the Trump Campaign fraudulently raising more than $250 million from their own supporters based on fraudulent claims we now know Trump absolutely knew to be fraudulent at the time he made the fraudulent claims.
- Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with non-fraudulent news on the impact of climate change on East Africa‘s deadly drought; the corrupted SCOTUS plans to undermine climate regulations next term; SpaceX grounded in Texas; and some better news for the climate out of the great state of California…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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As if you didn’t have enough to write about … now the writers are at it … what next … well … AI?
“In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors†that may USE AI … MANIPULATING ELECTIONS …” (GodFather of AI, emphasis added) … shhh The Donald might hear.
Dredd –
For what it’s worth (which may not be much!), I’m not sure how AI would be used to manipulate actual election results, in case that’s what you were concerned about.
It could be a lack of imagination on my part, as to how that could be done. But I suspect the concern would be more in using AI to manipulate social media and news stories, etc. (Not that that is good either, of course!)
Brad @#2,
I was quoting “the godfather of AI” who quit his Google leadership role in AI to warn about election manipulation among other things.
This 60 Minutes video is informative :
https://youtu.be/880TBXMuzmk