Over at Bloomberg, Josh Tyrangiel has an excellent interview with OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, which I found well worth reading, though surely not “definitive,” regarding all the melodrama surrounding Sam’s role in founding OpenAI, not to mention his dramatic dismissal, his dramatic rehiring, and then predictable departure for greener, for-profit pastures. For all I know,…
Tag: Donald Trump
Everyone must obey the law, says US Chief Justice John Roberts. Except Donald Trump, of course.
Yes, US Chief Justice John Roberts, who makes US Chief Justice Roger “Dred Scott Decision” Taney look like John Marshall (pretty much) has addressed a “warning” to Donald Trump (well, pretty much) not to defy the federal courts in his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary, to wit: Every Administration suffers defeats in…
Donald Trump not a nice man, John Bolton discovers
No, Donald Trump is not a nice man, although it took his re-election for this utterly omnipresent fact to penetrate the hitherto impenetrable pate of one John Bolton. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, M. Moustache, America’s most compulsive interventionist, a man who once demanded that the U.S. invade Luxembourg (“and for keeps this time,…
The Curious Case of the Souring Centrists What’s the Deal with Nate n’ Damon?
Over at his substack blog, Notes from the Middleground, Damon Linker has a disturbing—though not in the way he imagines—post up, titled Dialectical Contributions to Democratic Breakdown, commenting on varieties of “bad news for democracies” from around the world—including South Korea, Romania, and, unfortunately, the U.S., which is, unsurprisingly enough, the only one I’m going…
The New York Times and Dan Drezner get all Jeff Bezos on your ass
That’s seems to be the motto at the Gray Lady these days, judging from a recent column by Tufts Professor Daniel Drezner, The Evolution of Marco Rubio, dispassionately describing the transformation of a standard-issue Republican hawk, Florida Sen. Mario Rubio, now “tabbed” to be Trump’s secretary of state, into a standard-issue MAGA clone, with a…
Making a pact with the Devil has a downside, Republicans discover.
It’s “amusing”—I’m pretty sure that’s a smile (of sorts) on my face rather than a rictus of despair—watching Republican senators attempt to swallow their “pride” and pretend that Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Miami Matt Gaetz, aka “the Viceman”, is “appropriate”. The same may be said for Robert F. “Vaccine Man” Kennedy, and, well,…
Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the truth prevail
On November 8, 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s first triumph, I wrote “It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear.” Today, we are not so lucky. What I had to say in my earlier post, which bore the…
Mind at the end of its tether, more or less.
If, in January 2015, someone had asked me if I could imagine that, in November 2024, the American people would be ready to re-elect as president a man who, on losing his first attempt at re-election in 2020 had summoned a mob on January 6, 2021 with the express purpose of pressuring the U.S. Congress…
Amy Coney Barrett to her sisters: “Ladies, ladies, ladies! You shouldn’t call Chief Justice John Roberts a two-bit political whore just because he is one! That’s not polite!”
Well, indeed it isn’t, but it is quite apropos factually, which is sometimes supposed to count in legal matters. Both Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, The Supreme Court’s “Unanimous” Trump Ballot Ruling Is Actually a 5–4 Disaster, and Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy, Supreme Court rules for Trump in Section 3 disqualification case, are…
Adam Rubenstein and the Times: Yes, but …
Undeservedly ousted conservative NYT editor Adam Rubenstein is deservedly getting plenty of ink n’ pixels with his tale of undeserved trauma, I Was a Heretic at The New York Times, over at the Atlantic, recounting, among other things, how he received, well, a “woke up” call on his very first day, in the course of…