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Deep Fake A.I. Ads Might Kill Us All

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Ted Rall
            Seeing is believing. In the age of AI, it shouldn’t be.             In June, for example, Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign issued a YouTube ad that used generative artificial-intelligence technology to produce a deep-fake image of former President Donald Trump hugging appearing to hug  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former COVID-19 czar despised by anti-vax and anti-lockdown Republican voters. Video of Elizabeth Warren has been manipulated to make her look as though she was calling for Republicans to be banned from voting. She wasn’t. As early as 2019, a Malaysian cabinet minister was targeted by a AI-generated video clip that falsely but convincingly portrayed him as confessing to having appeared in a gay sex video. Ramping up in earnest with the 2024 presidential campaign, this kind of chicanery is going to start happening a lot. And away we go: “The Republican National Committee in April released an entirely AI-generated ad meant to show the future of the United States if President…
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The Daunting Physics of Bidenomics

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Ted Rall
Unemployment is low—lower than at any time since the Vietnam War. Real wages are increasing. Inflation, voters’ top concern for the last several years, is slowing. Democrats are confident enough about how things are going that “Bidenomics” is at the center of their case for another four years in the White House. Yet this is a rosy picture few voters can see. Americans consistently give President Biden low marks for his handling of the economy. “I’ve never seen this big of a disconnect between how the economy is actually doing and key polling results about what people think is going on,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, tells the New York Times. What gives? Jason Furman, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama, points to a years-long trend that only ended recently: wages haven’t kept up with inflation, leaving the average worker $2,000 worse off than under Trump’s final…
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The Right To Be Wrong

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Ted Rall
Many medical experts and journalists believe that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is wrong about vaccines. They say that Kennedy, a candidate for the 2024 Democratic nomination for president, wrongly says that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and incorrectly validates assertions that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. Many people, all of whom are pro-Biden Democrats, say that RFK Jr.’s opinions are so dangerous as to automatically preempt anything else he has to say about any other issue. They say that society would benefit if he were to shut up. They say that he should not be given a public platform, that he should be silenced, that we should not hear him because we might believe him and that could cause terrible harm. Even his family is telling him to STFU. As a long-time non-epidemiologist with no medical education, I don’t know who is right. However, I do know this: anyone who thinks they have the right to decide what information I get…
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After Impeachment, Clinton Paved the Way for Trump

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Ted Rall
            The laws of political physics, it seemed, had been reversed.             The president had been exposed as a pathological liar and a serial cheater. The butt of relentless jokes on television comedy shows and online, his reputation and legacy in tatters, he endured the ultimate opprobrium a federal official can face under the American constitutional system, impeachment, as well as the worst indignity possible for a lawyer, disbarment.             The president, of course, was Bill Clinton. The year was 1998. But just when it seemed that he was doomed to slink off into the humiliation of single-digit approval ratings and Richard Nixon-esque oblivion, the opposite happened. Despite Monica Lewinsky and “it depends on the meaning of is” and impeachment, Democrats didn’t abandon him. To the contrary, they came to his defense. Senate Democrats refused to ratify impeachment with a formal conviction. Liberal voters, including many whose support for Clinton had been tepid at best, rallied around a president they…
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We Came, We Dithered, We Died

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Ted Rall
“We believe that the damage done to the ocean in the last 20 years is somewhere between 30 per cent and 50 per cent, which is a frightening figure. And this damage carries on at very high speed—to the Indian Ocean, to the Red Sea, to the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic…Everywhere around the world the coral reefs are disappearing at a very great rate, to such an extent we are not sure we will see anything like what we know now.” Jacques Cousteau wrote these words in 1971, for an New York Times op-ed titled “Our Oceans Are Dying.” No one listened. No one cared. No one did anything. So now, as Cousteau warned us would happen, our oceans are finished. More than 90% of coral reefs on Earth will be dead in the next 25 years. What if we did…something? No. Reef extinction is irreversible, even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases right this second. 96% of…
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Can You Vote for a Third Party? Take the Test.

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Ted Rall
            The idea that third parties are spoilers is a baseless conspiracy theory on par with the Loch Ness monster, the man on the grassy knoll, and Pizzagate. But what if you’re worried, like many Democrats, that voting for a third party like the Greens’ Cornel West or, if they ever get their act together, someone from the No Labels Party, might improve Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House next year?             Given just how bizarre, manic and exhausting Trump’s four years were, I don’t blame you for being paranoid. It was a rough time for Democrats, more so than under previous Republican administrations. You’re traumatized. You’ll do just about anything to stop that from happening again! (Those of us on the Actual Left, not Democrats, found Trump’s time in the White House more amusing than dispiriting. Sure, he mostly did stuff that we didn’t like. But so did Biden. Anyway, it’s not about us…not this week.)…
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Hail to the Jailbird President

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Ted Rall
            Each time Donald Trump has been indicted, his poll numbers went up—among Republican voters who closed ranks around him in response to what they decried as politically motivated “lawfare.” Now he enjoys a commanding lead for the GOP nomination.             Of course, it’s one thing to win the nomination of your party, an exercise that requires motivating the hardcore partisans who form the ideological base. To prevail in a general election, conventional wisdom says, you’ll need to appeal to moderates and swing voters. Democrats pivot right after their summer convention; Republicans don’t pivot left as much as they pull back their red meat appeals to the right.             That said, corporate media seems determined not to plumb the depths of  cluelessness-driven embarrassment they displayed in 2016, when the New York Times told readers on election morn that Hillary had an 85% chance of winning. “Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the…
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Democrats and Republicans “Stole” Over 35,000,000 Votes From the Greens and Libertarians in 2020

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Ted Rall
Many things that everyone knows, are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely-believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true, but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true. Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly declares, without bothering to cite evidence because their statement’s obviousness rises to the level of self-evident, that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election (not true) and Jill Stein sucked away enough Democratic votes from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House (also not true). Let us, for the purpose of this essay, set aside the usual counterarguments to the claim that you shouldn’t vote Green because they’re just spoilers: no presidential election is decided by a single vote so you can’t possibly individually change the outcome, people who don’t live in swing states have no reason to worry about tipping an…
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Biden Ghosts His Granddaughter. He’s Always Been Mean.

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Ted Rall
Joe Biden recently told a group of children that he has “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.” Sounds sweet. It’s not. People who read and watch Republican-leaning news outlets have long known that the president has a seventh grandchild, the product of Hunter Biden and his former girlfriend, Lunden Roberts. Hunter, who lives at the White House with his dad, has abandoned his four-year-old daughter Navy Roberts. He has refused to have anything to do with her. Joe, her grandfather, also pretends his granddaughter doesn’t exist, as though he were Grover Cleveland in the 19th century. (Even old Grover didn’t get away with unpersoning his illegitimate baby.) Last week, the New York Times broke the liberal media’s silence on the story, shocking Democrats. Among the yucky details: Hunter went to court to block the little girl from using her father’s surname, Biden. This is serious stuff: parental abandonment…
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Democrats in Denial

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Ted Rall
            Denial is neither a river in Egypt nor just a psychological defense mechanism identified by Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. It’s the guiding principle of President Biden’s reelection campaign.             Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans, including most Democrats, don’t want Biden to run again because they think he’s too old. This is not new information—Biden and the Democrats knew voters were concerned about his age four years ago, when they signaled his intention to be a one-term, transitional president.             Nevertheless, he decided to run again.             Two weeks after he announced his 2024 campaign, Biden’s approval rating fell to his all-time low, 36 percent in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. No president in the history of modern polling has won reelection with numbers this low at this stage in the cycle.             Yet he remained in the race.             Biden faces two challengers, neither of whom has been taken seriously by the media, run TV…
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