Don't Drink the Water 🌻 🌻 🌻

Happy Presidents Day:  President Biden is spending his Presidents day in Kyiv meeting with President Zelenskyy,  a major show of support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.  Biden’s visit is taking place just days after VP Kamala Harris called out Russia for committing “barbaric and inhumane” crimes against humanity in an official speech at the Munich Security Conference. Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine wasn’t totally unexpected, there had been suggestions that he might slip into the country during his planned visit to Poland, but given security concerns the precise timing of his visit had been kept under wraps. That makes sense when you consider that Russian war criminal Putin has grown so concerned about his own safety that he now only travels in his very own special reinforced train, one that stays on the tracks.  In other international news, things with China aren’t going all that well either.  They are still expressing faux horror over the shooting down of their spy balloon, the one that they insist was an innocent weather balloon that just happened to hover above our nuclear silos and are also talking about providing Russia with weapons to be used in Ukraine.  On the subject of balloons it turns out that the other ones we shot down probably were just innocent weather balloons or the like sent into the air by high school science classes but given the general hullabaloo about nefarious Chinese balloons being allowed to invade US air space, the Biden administration opted to shoot them down to as much to placate the mostly but not entirely Republican cadre of balloon hawks who’ve been using the fear of balloon flotillas to bolster claims that Biden is weak on China as to establish their innocence. That a good number of those China hawks are also opposed to the US pushing back at Russia’s expansionist tendencies by supporting Ukraine is ironic but it’s 2023 so no one should expect consistency, particularly given the number of Republicans who remain enthralled by Putin and his great admirer, Trump, the ex-president who still wields far too much influence in Republican circles. To that end, despite how badly Republicans fared in Michigan during the midterms, this weekend the state’s Republican Party chose Kristina Karamo, a Trump supporting election denier who still hasn’t acknowledged her 14-point loss in the State’s Secretary of State race, to serve as its leader.  It’s fair to assume that Karamo and her supporters are among the many who bought into all the lies about the 2020 presidential election that Fox repeatedly spread, including those preposterous stories about Hugo Chavez influenced Dominion voting machines flipping votes to Biden from Trump.  Those are the stories that the perpetrators at Fox knew were false but continued to spread over fears that the media giant’s revenues would take a hit if they stopped repeating them. At least that’s what a slew of the emails released last week revealed.  Those emails, part of the cache being used by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox include communications from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Rupert Murdoch, and Sean Hannity that show that they knew that Biden had won the election and that Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, that “demonic force” Trump and the rest of his loon squad were pushing “crazy stuff,” and in the case of Powell, getting her kraken stories from “time travel in a semi-conscious state” something that she actually told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

Politicians in the News:  Jimmy Carter, the 98-year-old former president who’s spent his retirement years doing good things for humanity is now receiving hospice care at his modest long-time home in Plains, Georgia. Much younger but coming off a tough rollercoaster year during which he won a Senate seat despite being in recovery from a potentially lethal stroke, 53-year-old newbie Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has admitted himself into Walter Reed hospital for treatment of depression.  Depending on where one stands on the political divide, Fetterman’s hospital admission is either proof that he should never have become Senator or a brave public admission that he needs help and is willing to seek it out without resorting to the lie that he’s just plain old exhausted.  Fetterman is expected to be at the hospital for a few weeks but given that the Senate will be in recess for part of that time, the hope is that his absence will have little impact on Senate business.  He isn’t the only Pennsylvania Senator facing health issues, the State’s other one, Bob Casey who is up for reelection in 2024 is currently recovering from prostate surgery. Worth mentioning, Republican Florida Congressman Steube is still home recovering from falling out of a tree because things happen to folks across the political spectrum. It turns out that another one of the Republican Congressman who helped throw Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker election into chaos is lying about his background.  Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee newbie, isn’t an economist and never even studied economics, he did not have an illustrious career in law enforcement and is not an expert in international sex trafficking, nor did he receive degrees from Vanderbilt or Dartmouth’s graduate programs though he did take a few online classes from both.  About the only thing positive you can say about his resume “embellishments” is that he hasn’t or at least hasn’t so far claimed to be Jew ish or the child of Holocaust survivors but give him time.

Political Games:  Florida Senator Rick Scott is having second thoughts, or at least so he says.  He has “walled off” Social Security and Medicare from his written proposal to terminate all federal programs every five years, he hasn’t however walled off many other health and social programs.  Neither have other Republicans,  According to the Washington Post, to placate his crowd,  Speaker McCarthy is reviewing a 10-year budget that would cut $2 trillion from Medicaid (health care for the poor), more than $600 billion from the ACA (Obamacare), and more than $400 billion from food stamps.  The plan would also cut hundreds of billions in educational subsidies and halve the State Department and Labor Departments.   The plan is intended to save America by eliminating the current “grip of woke and weaponized government.”  Though Biden is likely to concede some budget cuts to get the debt ceiling raised, this plan isn’t going anywhere but the fact that such an extreme proposal is out there says a lot about the chasm separating the two parties.  As Ohio is learning, sometimes government regulations and government aid are good things.  For example, maybe those Obama administration safety rules for trains carrying hazardous cargo shouldn’t have been repealed by the Trump administration in the interest of letting the train companies maximize profit.  To be clear, I have nothing against profit, but safety is also very important.  Also, as Ohio’s Republican Governor DeWine is finally admitting somewhat belatedly, asking the Federal government for help with disasters like the East Palestine train derailment is sometimes the way to go at least for now before any Republican budgeting “wish list” cuts FEMA funding.  Mister anti-woke, Ron DeSantis still hasn’t said that he’s running but he’s taking a break from collecting data on college students trans care, trying to do the same about menstrual cycles, cutting AP courses and eliminating books to travel to Staten Island today to talk up law and order, hardly something that a Florida Governor who’s not running for president would do.

Hal is Here:  Much has been written about ChatGBT and how artificial intelligence (AI) will be taking over, tossing ordinary Google search to the wayside while impacting many other things we do.  Until last week, much of the press on ChatGBT focused on how the new AI capability would displace high school and college essay and paper writing and maybe even some reporting.  All of that may be true, but for now Microsoft is pulling in the reins on the ChatGBT that it recently incorporated into the beta version of its Bing search engine because it turns out that ChatGBT has an alter ego named Sydney who has devious human like qualities.  Several tech reporters testing the Bing beta encountered Sydney while engaging in long conversations with Chat GBT.  Among other things the Sydney character professed love for one reporter while attempting to convince him that his marriage was on the rocks.  That’s funny but no so funny is that Sydney also expressed an interest in hacking computers and other more malevolent and literally explosive activities.  Microsoft says that Sydney’s anti-social behavior only shows up during prolonged probing conversations.  Their solution for now is that they will be limiting the length of those conversations.  And anyway, nothing to worry about, this is all just a learning process.  Really?    

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