Editors’ Blog

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary election, Senator Jon Tester’s (D-MT) decision to run again and President Biden’s clandestine trip to Kyiv.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Kate Riga on how the biggest Social Security cutters — Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, etc — are out there doing their thing even as elected Republicans are in high dudgeon over the mere suggestion that the GOP has been trying to undermine Social Security since its inception.

Morning Memo is your daily highly caffeinated jolt of pure TPM news pumped right into your veins. You know you need it.

Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith to appear before a federal grand jury for testimony. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt have the latest here.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were reportedly both compelled to share testimony on Trump’s various schemes to stay in the White House after he lost the election to President Biden in 2020 and his role in siccing a mob of his supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

I’ve mentioned this many times before. But it’s one of the true privileges of this job to have the asset of this site’s readership as I explore new issues raised in the news. Readers who were only readers for years and now sometimes decades become active participants as the site’s focus shifts to their area of expertise. “20 year reader here,” said one last night, “finally you address a topic I’m an expert in!”

I’ve heard from a range of readers who are top executives and engineers at companies on the forefront of artificial intelligence, computer science academics, people who have some angle of expertise on the topic. I’ve been hearing from more people on the “pro-AI” side of things. But “pro” or “con” doesn’t really do justice to the conversation.

I just wanted to drop this in here because it’s an important set of facts that I suspect will be a big issue both in the coming GOP primary and — if DeSantis gets the GOP nomination — during the 2024 general election.

A week ago I noted that, contrary to press claims that only a few GOP outliers have called for cutting or phasing out Social Security, the great majority of House Republicans had already endorsed doing so during this fiscal year. There’s a lot of press special pleading surrounding proposals for Social Security cuts: It’s only Rick Scott or Ron Johnson or Mike Lee. In fact, such proposals are GOP orthodoxy and have been for decades. The Republican Study Committee, which is a caucus including about three-quarters of House Republicans, endorsed a proposed budget for this fiscal year calling for Social Security privatization, benefit cuts (through changed COLA formulas), raising the retirement age to 70 and more.

Amidst all the storm and drama I’ve been enjoying learning more about just how the current crop of AI applications (LLMs, or Large Language Models) operate. I don’t want to imply that I understand them at a deep level — my programming career peaked with some piecework programming in Visual Basic that I did in grad school. (Actually, there was also that extremely elegant bubble sort program I wrote in middle school. But I digress …) But it has at least given me some sense of the roots of the limitations that are coming to the fore. Specifically — but not only — the way applications like ChatGPT frequently fabricate false claims clothed in the trappings of facticity. I’m not just claiming this new protein structure exists. I’m citing the specific journal article with the page numbers and date and authors, etc. It’s got to be true!

To the great distress of many MAGA Republicans, President Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv early this morning (U.S. time). Here are some of the most striking images.

I’ve had questions from a number of you about why there’s been so little mainstream media pick up of Seymour Hersh’s claim that the U.S. destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline last year. As a factual matter, I think it’s highly unlikely that this is true. But my point here isn’t to dispute the report. People know that Hersh is one of the most high profile and celebrated investigative reporters of the last half century. So how is it he’s suddenly seen as an unreliable source of information?

On this point I think I can shed some light.

The White House has congratulated Rick Scott for confessing his desire to destroy Social Security and seeking forgiveness.