“See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation”

campaigns, cheap speech

NYT:

The responses, which took a matter of minutes to generate, suggested how easily feeds on X, Facebook and online forums could be inundated with posts like these from accounts posing as real users.

False and manipulated information online is nothing new. The 2016 presidential election was marred by state-backed influence campaigns on Facebook and elsewhere — efforts that required teams of people.

Now, one person with one computer can generate the same amount of material, if not more. What is produced depends largely on what A.I. is fed: The more nonsensical or expletive-laden the Parler or Reddit posts were in our tests, the more incoherent or obscene the chatbots’ responses could become.

And as A.I. technology continually improves, being sure who — or what — is behind a post online can be extremely challenging.

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“As the 2024 Race Heats Up, Betting Is Growing for Everything but Elections”

Uncategorized

NYT:

I can’t watch a basketball game on TV without seeing ads urging me to place a bet on one app or another.

I can’t walk down the street in New York City without seeing ads about the latest lottery jackpot.

And when I sit at my desk in the office, I spend hours studying another type of betting — trading in financial markets, where you can place wagers on companies, bonds, commodities and derivatives of all descriptions.

Yet the most consequential betting of all — wagers on elections in the United States — may soon be shut down by regulators.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has ordered a ban on such betting on the financial exchanges known as prediction markets, where it’s possible to make wagers on who will win the 2024 presidential election and on a host of other matters. And the commission’s proposed new rule would give it the power to block trading on a broad range of other subjects.

Even so, the prediction markets, which allow people to place bets on the outcome of a wide range of events, including American elections, are fighting back in the courts. And despite the regulatory crackdown, many markets are open and running.

I’ve used prediction markets for years — never for trading but as a source of information gleaned from prices that represent the collective wisdom of thousands of people. All market pricing needs to be analyzed with a heavy dose of skepticism, of course, yet these markets are a useful adjunct to polls, economic and political models and traditional reporting, especially in a fraught election year like this one.

“Prediction markets on elections and other economically meaningful events have much greater social utility than essentially every other form of gambling that is currently legal,” said Eric Zitzewitz, a Dartmouth economist who has studied these markets extensively. “We learn nothing from a crap game, and very close to nothing that’s economically interesting from sports betting. But having a market price the odds of economically meaningful political outcomes is extremely valuable to those who are affected by them.”…

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“2 Liberal Groups to Spend $5 Million on State Supreme Court Races”

campaign finance, judicial elections

NYT:

Two groups on the left with differing missions are joining forces to bolster their preferred candidates in state supreme court races in November, as such elections grow increasingly expensive and politically polarizing.

The two organizations — the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the Democrats’ arm in fighting for state and congressional maps; and Planned Parenthood Votes, the political arm of the abortion health care organization — will initially target races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. The fund, with a budget of $5 million, will provide digital ads along with funding for canvassing and get-out-the-vote operations.

“Our aim is to protect the independence of state supreme courts, to ensure that they are composed of justices who are dedicated to interpreting the law in a neutral way, who will adhere to precedent and who will protect the fundamental rights of all citizens,” Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general who is chairman of the redistricting group, said in a statement announcing the joint venture.

Until recent years, state supreme court races were traditionally relatively nonpartisan affairs — in most states candidates are not officially affiliated with a political party — though partisan leanings could be gleaned from judicial rulings. But political interest in state supreme court races has exploded, culminating in a $50 million race for State Supreme Court in Wisconsin last year….

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“Miriam Adelson’s Unfinished Business”

campaign finance

New York goes deep:

Money to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Money to the Zionist Organization of America. Money to the Republican Jewish Committee. So much money up and down the ballot and across the globe that a candidate’s position on Israeli foreign policy — that is, a candidate’s position on a tiny country that most voters cared about not at all — determined the size of a campaign war chest. In 2005, trying a new tactic, Adelson gave $250,000 to President George W. Bush’s second inauguration. Sheldon did the same. The $500,000 combined got Adelson enough access to drop off at the White House literature about Islamic Jihad and tell Bush’s chief of staff, “I would like the president to see this.”

“It’s really amazing that we have this influence,” she said at the time. But the $500,000 did not get Adelson all that she wanted. Bush advocated for “two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.” Adelson has never believed in what she called the “useless mold of the so-called peace process.”…

Citizens United, ruled on by the Supreme Court in 2010, was, to Adelson, a matanat el, a “gift from God.” Liberated to give unlimited amounts to super-PACs, Adelson donated $46 million to GOP causes in the 2012 election cycle, more than twice as much as the next 15 women donors combined. The Republican Party platform was not a flawless fit. “I don’t agree with the Republican stance on abortion,” she told Hadassah magazine. “Religion shouldn’t be political. But nothing is perfect.”

The press often reported the Adelsons’ giving as Sheldon’s. But it was not just Sheldon’s. Over the course of their marriage, Sheldon made 848 campaign donations. Miriam made 717. Over his lifetime, Sheldon gave $273 million to political campaigns. Miriam, 12 years younger, has given $284 million to date….

Adelson had learned her lesson from Bush in 2005: $500,000 to an inauguration is useless; $500,000 is chump change. She and Sheldon donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration. For the swearing-in, they sat up on the dais, a few rows behind Jared Kushner. Sheldon, then 83, looked spectrally pale, his peripheral neuropathy catching up with him. Miriam, 71, looked tanned, radiant, giddy, girlish. She snapped photos on her phone, her platinum-blonde hair glinting against her black camel-wool coat.

In the fourth year of his presidency, Trump announced his Middle East peace plan, which wasn’t really a peace plan at all. Kushner had designed it without any input from Palestinians. Netanyahu called it “the deal of the century.” Trump delivered a few pieces of the plan while still in office: He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a clear insult to the Palestinians, as they, too, consider Jerusalem their capital. At the ceremony celebrating the Embassy’s move, Adelson beamed from the front row. That same day, at the Gaza border, Israeli soldiers killed 58 Palestinians protesting the Embassy move.

Many political-fundraising experts, including Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s chief ethics lobbyist, believe Adelson will be Trump’s top patron in 2024, as she was in 2020. What will she expect in return? Beyond unconditional support for the Israel-Hamas war, one can assume she’ll press for the unfinished items of Trump’s Israel agenda from last term. Top of that list: Israel annexing the West Bank and the U.S. recognizing its sovereignty there….

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“Time to Close the Hatch Act’s Escape Hatch”

conflict of interest laws, ethics investigations

Hampton Dellinger for Politico:

Since the Hatch Act was passed in 1939, government workers have faced strict limits on their political activity. And rightly so. Federal employees should be on the job for the public good, not partisan ends. Violators can be reprimanded, fined and even barred from federal service.

While the Hatch Act is broad on paper, a loophole has emerged in practice: senior White House personnel (including assistants to the president and others deemed commissioned officers) aren’t being subjected to the law’s full enforcement. Today, that changes.

I was recently nominated and confirmed to lead the Office of Special Counsel, the independent agency responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act for millions of federal workers. And after a careful review of past and present policies, I’m updating my agency’s enforcement approach to put an end to such differential treatment.

OSC brings Hatch Act violations to the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent and quasi-judicial body, and the board can impose a range of sanctions if it determines the rules were broken.

But, in the past, OSC has declined to bring MSPB cases against White House officials. Instead, OSC has left the question of whether punishment should be imposed to the sole discretion of the president. This distinction creates separate and not automatically equal systems of accountability for violators, one where an independent adjudicator (the MSPB) can impose sanctions and another where it is left to the president to dole out — or not — any consequences….

And while I have great respect for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, I do not believe (as my office has suggested in recent years) that a 1978 DOJ opinion assessing draft legislation should be considered sufficient support for OSC to unequivocally exempt White House staff from the same Hatch Act enforcement regime other federal workers face.

As a result, I am announcing that prior OSC statements that White House officials cannot face Hatch Act enforcement in the same way other federal civilian employees do are no longer in effect. It is time to close the Hatch Act’s escape hatch….

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“RFK Jr. lists voting address at Westchester home — that’s in foreclosure and neighbors have never seen him”

Uncategorized

NY Post:

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lists his residence to vote as a tony Westchester County address — which is in foreclosure proceedings for non-payment, court records show.

The independent candidate claims his voting address is 84 Croton Lake Road In Katonah, though he is not the owner of the million-dollar property-in-arrears, does not show up in resident searches for it, and some longtime neighbors — and even local authorities — were shocked at the notion it’s his home.

“No … he doesn’t live here,” a local cop insisted Sunday.

But RFK Jr. also has the same address listed as his “domicile” — or residence — on his presidential nomination petitions filed in New Hampshire in recent months, according to the records, which were obtained by The Post.

A review of voting records show RFK Jr. voted in primary and/or general elections using that New York address as recently as 2020 — and in 2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010 and 2008. 

He voted by mail during the COVID-outbreak using the Croton Lake address, too.  

The legal owner of the property is Barbara Moss, the wife of longtime RFK pal Timothy Haydock, a Westchester doctor….

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