All she wanted was a movie produced by her daughter and blame President Trump.
Jan6 was not an insurrection. If it had been hundreds of Democrats would have been executed for treason. The riots were a frame job on President Trump because he stands in the way of the Democrat’s socialist agenda.
Plain and simple!
****
We have responsibility, Terry. We did not have any accountability
New York Post
Nancy Pelosi says ‘I take responsibility’ for not having National Guard at the Capitol on Jan. 6, video shows
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) laid blame on herself for the lack of National Guard troops at the US Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, video footage released by House Republicans on Monday showed.
As rioters stormed the seat of Congress, Pelosi, 84, fumed about the lack of “accountability” and accepted “responsibility” for a lack of security ahead of former President Donald Trump’s “Stop The Steal” rally, the video clip – shot for an HBO documentary by the congresswoman’s daughter, Alexandra Pelosi – showed.
“We have responsibility, Terry,” Pelosi is heard telling her chief of staff Terri McCullough as they’re whisked away in a vehicle from the Capitol. ”We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous.”
Pelosi then appeared to chide McCullough for asking her amid the chaos if they should call in the National Guard.
“You’re gonna ask me in the middle of the thing, when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff, ‘should we call the Capitol Police?’ I mean the National Guard. Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” the former House Speaker said.
McCullough explains that “they thought that they had sufficient resources,” an answer that does not satisfy the California Democrat.
“It’s not a question of how they had … they don’t know! They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more,” Pelosi declared.
The exchange was part of about 45 minutes of footage handed over recently to the GOP-controlled House Administration oversight subcommittee, according to Politico.
A report on the riot, authored by House Republicans in 2022, found that Democratic leadership had concerns over the “optics” of having National Guard troops present at the Capitol Building in the aftermath of the summer 2020 “Black Lives Matter” protests.
Both the House and Senate Sergeant at Arms, as well as the chief of Capitol Police, resigned in the days following the riot.
A spokesperson for Pelosi dismissed the video clip released by House Republicans, accusing them of attempting to “whitewash” Jan. 6.
“Numerous independent fact-checkers have confirmed that Speaker Pelosi did not plan her own assassination,” Aaron Bennett wrote on X. “Cherry-picked out-of-context clips don’t change that.”
(Still blaming Trump even when you hear Pelosi’s words,)
(Three years later and still blaming President Trump.)
“Three years later, House Republicans are still trying to whitewash January 6th,” he added. “It’s shameful, unpatriotic & pathetic.”
(It should read Three years later – House Democrats are still trying to whitewash Jan6.)
As long as the left were the ones who were publishing misinformation – it was okay with them. Now that there is a MATCH MAKER helping out the opposite party – it is not okay to match them.
The Democrats have gotten by cheating since Bush I and now when they have some competition they don’t like it.
Too bad!
*****
Will the Government Stop Political Deepfakes Like Elon Musk’s Kamala Harris Ad?
Elon Musk recently made headlines when he posted a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris, with manipulated audio to make it sound like she called herself the “ultimate diversity hire” who doesn’t know the “first thing about running the country.” A month earlier, a Republican congressional candidate in Michigan posted a TikTok using the AI-generated voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to say he’d come back from the dead to endorse Anthony Hudson. In January, President Joe Biden’s voice was replicated using artificial intelligence to send a fake robocall to thousands of people in New Hampshire, urging them not to vote in the state’s primary the following day.
AI experts and lawmakers have been sounding the alarm, demanding more regulation as artificial intelligence is used to supercharge disinformation and misinformation. Now, it’s three months before the presidential election and the United States is ill-prepared to handle a potential onslaught of fake content heading our way.
Digitally-altered images – also known as deepfakes – have been around for decades, but, thanks to generative AI, they are now exponentially easier to make and harder to detect. As the threshold for making deepfakes has lowered, they are now being produced at scale and are increasingly more difficult to regulate. To make matters more challenging, government agencies are fighting about when and how to regulate this technology – if at all – and AI experts worry that a failure to act could have a devastating impact on our democracy. Some officials are proposing basice regulations that would disclose when AI is used in political ads, but Republican political appointees are standing in the way.
Related video: Elon Musk accused of spreading fake news; Musk’s misleading election posts spreading rapidly (WION)
his controversial statements and opinions.
WION
Elon Musk accused of spreading fake news; Musk’s misleading election posts spreading rapidly “Any time that you’re dealing with misinformation or disinformation intervening in elections, we need to imagine that it’s a kind of voter suppression,” says Dr. Alondra Nelson. Nelson was the deputy director and acting director of Joe Biden’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and led the creation of the AI Bill of Rights. She says that AI misinformation is “keeping people from having a reliable information environment in which they can make decisions about pretty important issues in their lives.” Rather than stopping people from getting to the polls to vote, she says, this new type of voter suppression is an “insidious, slow erosion of people’s trust in the truth” which affects their trust in the legitimacy of institutions and the government.
Nelson says that the fact that Musk’s deepfake video post is still up online proves that we cannot count on companies to abide by their own rules about misinformation. “There have to be clear guardrails, clear bright lines about what’s acceptable and not acceptable on the part of individual actors and companies, and consequences for that behavior.”
Multiple states have passed regulations on AI-generated deepfakes in elections, but federal regulations are harder to come by. This month, the Federal Communications Commission is accepting public comments on the agency’s proposed rules to require advertisers disclose when AI technology is used in political ads on radio and television. (The FCC does not have jurisdiction over online content.)
Since the 1930s, the FCC has required TV and radio stations to keep a record of information about who’s buying campaign ads and how much they paid. Now, the agency is proposing adding a question asking whether AI was used in the production of the ad. The proposal wouldn’t prohibit the use of AI in ads; it would simply ask if AI was used.
“We have this national tool that has existed for decades,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel tells Rolling Stone in a phone interview. “We decided that now is a good time to try to modernize it in a really simple way, when I think a lot of voters just want to know: are you using this technology? Yes or no?”
Rosenworcel says there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to AI and misinformation. She points to the fake Biden robocall, which the FCC responded to by invoking the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which restricts the use of artificial voices in telephone calls. The FCC then worked with the New Hampshire attorney general, who brought criminal charges against the man who created the robocall.
“You’ve got to start somewhere and I don’t think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” says Rosenworcel. “I think building on a foundation that’s been around for decades is a good place to start.”
The Federal Election Commission’s Republican chairman Sean Cooksey opposes the FCC’s latest proposal, claiming it would “sow chaos” since it is so close to an election.
“Every American should be disturbed that the Democrat-controlled FCC is pushing ahead with its radical plan to change the rules on political ads mere weeks before the general election,” Cooksey said in a written statement to Rolling Stone. “Not only would these vague rules intrude on the Federal Election Commission’s jurisdiction, but they would sow chaos among political campaigns and confuse voters before they head to the polls. The FCC should abandon this misguided proposal.”
The FEC has for years routinely deadlocked on matters as Republicans on the commission have worked to prevent new regulation on nearly anything for years.
The watchdog group Public Citizen petitioned the FEC to engage in a rulemaking on artificial intelligence, and in the past Cooksey said the agency would have an update in early summer.
Cooksey told Axios that the FEC won’t move to regulate AI in political advertising this year, and the commission is set to vote on closing out Public Citizen’s petition on Aug. 15. “The better approach is for the FEC to wait for direction from Congress and to study how AI is actually used on the ground before considering any new rules,” Cooksey told the outlet, adding that the agency “will continue to enforce its existing regulations against fraudulent misrepresentation of campaign authority regardless of the medium.”
AI experts believe that action needs to be taken, urgently. “We’re not going to be able to solve all of these problems,” says Nelson, adding that there’s no silver bullet answer to fix all AI-enabled deepfakes. “I think we often come to the problem space of AI with that kind of perspective as opposed to saying, unfortunately there’s always going to be crime and we can’t stop it, but what we can do is add friction. We can make sure that people have consequences on the other side of their bad behavior that we hope can be mitigating.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) has been calling for congressional legislation on artificial intelligence for years. A bipartisan bill targeting non-consensual deepfake AI porn recently passed the Senate.
“It was inevitable that these new technologies, particularly AI, that enable you to distort imagery and voices, would be weaponized at some stage to provide confusion, misinformation, disinformation to the American people,” says Clarke.
“[There’s] no way of truly discerning a fabricated picture versus something that is factual and real, [which] puts the American people at a disadvantage, particularly in these no-holds-barred campaigning.”
Clarke introduced the REAL Political Ads Act in May 2023, to require campaign ads to disclose and digitally watermark videos or images in ads created by generative AI. “We’ve gotten quite a few co-sponsors of the legislation, but it hasn’t been moved by the [Republican] majority on the Energy and Commerce Committee,” says Clarke.
“It’s an open field for those who want to create misinformation and disinformation right now, because there’s nothing that regulates it,” says Clarke. She points out that she’s also working on this with the Congressional Black Caucus, given the fact marginalized communities and minorities are often disproportionately the targets of misinformation. “We’re behind the curve here in the United States, and I’m doing everything I can to push us into the future as rapidly as possible.”
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury used to run ethical AI for X (formerly Twitter) before Musk took over and is now the U.S. Science Envoy of Artificial Intelligence. She says the broader issue at hand is that America is at a dangerous, all-time low of trust in the government, elections, and communication institutions. She says the FEC could be further eroding its own credibility by not taking action.
“Here we are in a state of crisis about the institutions and government which we should trust, and they’re going to sit on their hands and be like, ‘We don’t know if we should do something?'” says Chowdhury. “If they are not seen as doing something about deepfakes, this may actually further tarnish the image they have from the American people.”
As for Musk’s specific sharing of the Harris deepfake, Chowdhury says she doesn’t know why people are so surprised that he’s doing it. Musk has turned X (formerly Twitter) into a misinformation machine since he took over the platform.
(Not true – you all are just mad that some one is playing in your play pen.)
“Is it terrible? Absolutely,” says Chowdhury. “But it’s kind of like we’re the people at the face-eating leopards party. You’re going to be mad because this man is doing exactly what he said he was going to do? If you’re upset, then literally, don’t be on Twitter. Or know that if you are on the platform, you are complicit in allowing this man to manipulate the course of democracy.”
The choice of Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy one for the Never Trumpers who really meant never.
A Sense of Coherence
When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.
For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”
Related video: Former President Donald Trump Labels VP Kamala Harris a ‘Radical Left Person’ at Surprise Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago (Benzinga)
Former President Donald Trump Labels VP Kamala Harris a ‘Radical Left Person’ at Surprise Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago
Thiessen’s assessment of Harris is wholly exaggerated. The caricature is useful for the group that I have called anti-anti-Trumpers: those who claim to be Trump skeptics but find ways to rationalize his behavior by attacking his critics or those he’s up against. But at the core of Thiessen’s argument is the perception that Harris poses an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives.
On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.
Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for TheAtlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”
Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.
This past weekend, Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro very likely embraced election fraud to cling to power. In America, over the same weekend, a former president told supporters that if he returned to power, voting in future elections wouldn’t be necessary. “It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Trump said at an event for religious conservatives in Florida on Friday. As Brian Klaas writes in The Atlantic, “Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely, if ever, has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.”
We’ll find out soon whether Never Trumpers can truly align around Harris, or if policy-related infighting will get in the way. Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance. But at least the staunchest members of the movement seem to be cohering around support for Harris. For Never Trumpers who have been in the political wilderness for nearly a decade now, this is not the time to quibble over tax rates, the Green New Deal, fracking, or pronouns.
Harris is far from their first choice, but when your kitchen is in flames, you reach for whatever extinguisher is at hand. You can worry later about washing the dishes or whether you need a new garbage disposal. Put the fire out now.
President Biden proposed changes to the Supreme Court, including establishing term limits and adding a constitutional amendment that would limit presidential immunity. Is this DEAD ON ARRIVAL IN CONGRESS?
Venezuelan election officials declared that President Maduro won Venezuela’s election, but widespread concerns persist over the legitimacy of the election results.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday that Turkey might enter Israel to help Palestinians. In response, Israel’s foreign minister called on NATO to expel Turkey.
There are a few more out there who are already on the Democrat Marxists side – Cheney/Kinzinger are still swinging with the apes. Time will tell.
Biden just stated that Pelosi put pressure on him to bail out on his voters. What’s she up to – first it was Jan6 and now this. She appeared on TV a few days ago and was having trouble navigating words. Maybe Biden’s dementia is catching.
Are they making any sense – What did the Never Trumper’s achieve? Are they happy with their Biden/Obama/Rice/Pelosi decision?
THEY CUT THEIR NOSE OFF TO SPITE THEIR FACE.
You put Biden into office and look at our country?.
Now you put the country between a rock and a hard place.
Harris who is a Marxists/Socialist.
What was it that you didn’t like ABOUT President Trump putting our country back on top shelf and now look at what Biden/Obama did TO IT? After Obama changed our country into what? Gave pallets of money to Iran – for what? Are they still printing money to help terrorists?
If you don’t like President Trump – so what – I didn’t like Obama/Biden and now he is still tied to the government’s apron springs doing our country great harm. I vote for the person who will raise up our country not put it in the gutter and then tell you “you don’t count” when the taxpayers is paying his way.
The Never Trumpers are like too many hookers who were paid and not achievers? So, even now they are going to “go along” with the non-achiever Democrat/Marxists?
Do you like our economy/immigration/one world order?
One World Order immigration into our country would have never happened if President Trump would have been in office.
You and your never Trumpers are responsible for where we are today in our country. You are following the Bush family who are Democrats and there are not too many of them left in that party because most of them are Marxists/Socialists. So, you are hanging by a thread. There is no Democratic Party.
Do you know that Biden/Obama sent money to Iran for Hamas? They are taking you Never Trumpers down the terrorists’ road. I would think by now that you know that Obama was telling Biden/Susan Rice and then Pelosi what to do.
The choice of Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy one for the Never Trumpers who really meant never.
A Sense of Coherence
When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.
For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”
Related video: Former President Donald Trump Labels VP Kamala Harris a ‘Radical Left Person’ at Surprise Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago (Benzinga)
Benzing
Former President Donald Trump Labels VP Kamala Harris a ‘Radical Left Person’ at Surprise Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago
Thiessen’s assessment of Harris is wholly exaggerated. The caricature is useful for the group that I have called anti-anti-Trumpers: those who claim to be Trump skeptics but find ways to rationalize his behavior by attacking his critics or those he’s up against. But at the core of Thiessen’s argument is the perception that Harris poses an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives.
On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.
Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for TheAtlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”
Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.
This past weekend, Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro very likely embraced election fraud to cling to power. In America, over the same weekend, a former president told supporters that if he returned to power, voting in future elections wouldn’t be necessary. “It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Trump said at an event for religious conservatives in Florida on Friday. As Brian Klaas writes in The Atlantic, “Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely, if ever, has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.”
We’ll find out soon whether Never Trumpers can truly align around Harris, or if policy-related infighting will get in the way. Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance. But at least the staunchest members of the movement seem to be cohering around support for Harris. For Never Trumpers who have been in the political wilderness for nearly a decade now, this is not the time to quibble over tax rates, the Green New Deal, fracking, or pronouns.
Harris is far from their first choice, but when your kitchen is in flames, you reach for whatever extinguisher is at hand. You can worry later about washing the dishes or whether you need a new garbage disposal. Put the fire out now.
Related video: Former President Donald Trump Labels VP Kamala Harris a ‘Radical Left Person’ at Surprise Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago (Benzinga)
Benzing
