Mike Johnson, Polite Extremist

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [Mike Johnson, Polite Extremist]( Mike Johnson, Polite Extremist, Matthew D. Taylor, The Bulwark There are principled, conservative Christians with heartfelt moral views on abortion, LGBTQ-rights, and a host of other cultural issues who value democracy and pluralism and recognize their preferred policies won’t always win the day. (Think Russell Moore and David French.) And there are politically extreme conservative Christians who might hold the exact same views on the same issues as Moore and French, but who are also willing to upend democracy to see their agendas realized, which Moore and French simply are not. Politically extreme conservative Christians were some of the foremost leaders who bought into and bolstered Trump’s 2020 election lies, who used theology to justify their own authoritarianism, and who have brought their extremist theologies into the heart of right-wing politics. Mike Johnson can be located in this group. How do we know this? The key Christian instigators of January 6th I have tracked are part of an amorphous, nondenominational network called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). They believe and propagate extreme theologies that provide a mandate for Christians to take over society, and they have become increasingly influential in Republican politics in the past eight years. Several New Apostolic Reformation leaders—they usually call their leaders either apostles or prophets—were influential evangelical advisers to Donald Trump. (Presumably, some of them still are.) - [Autoworkers Strike a Blow for Equality]( Autoworkers Strike a Blow for Equality, Paul Krugman, The New York Times All three agreements involve a roughly 25 percent wage increase over the next four and a half years, plus other significant concessions. Autoworkers are a much smaller share of the work force than they were in Detroit’s heyday, but they’re still a significant part of the economy. Furthermore, this apparent union victory follows on significant organized-labor wins in other industries in recent months, notably a big settlement with United Parcel Service, where the Teamsters represent more than 300,000 employees. And maybe, just maybe, union victories in 2023 will prove to be a milestone on the way back to a less unequal nation. Some history you should know: Baby boomers like me grew up in a nation that was far less polarized economically than the one we live in today. We weren’t as much of a middle-class society as we liked to imagine, but in the 1960s we were a country in which many blue-collar workers had incomes they considered middle class, while extremes of wealth were far less than they have since become. For example, chief executives of major corporations were paid “only” 15 times as much as their average workers, compared with more than 200 times as much as their average workers now. - [Netanyahu, self-styled peerless leader, refuses to accept he presided over catastrophe]( Netanyahu, self-styled peerless leader, refuses to accept he presided over catastrophe, Shalom Yerushalami, The Times of Israel The dissonance between Netanyahu’s self-image as an all-powerful supreme leader and the worst disaster in the country’s history — on his watch — has completely unsettled the prime minister, shattering his equilibrium. In the first week after the Hamas massacre of over 1,400 people in the Gaza-adjacent communities, he was in a state of complete shock, at least according to several cabinet ministers. [...] On Saturday night, Netanyahu was asked at his press conference with Gallant and Gantz whether he took responsibility and whether a state commission of inquiry would be established. The prime minister dodged twice. Late that night, hours after a reporter at the press conference had suggested that the Shin Bet chief and head of IDF intelligence had warned him in writing of the growing likelihood of war, and it appeared to him and his loyalists that responsibility for the debacle was sticking to him, Netanyahu attacked the intelligence chiefs with full force in a tweet. Even in the middle of ground incursions into the Gaza Strip and the ongoing hostage crisis, what shook him to the core was the idea that the allegations were endangering his legacy. - [As the days get colder, nothing is better than a hot cup of coffee or tea (or cocoa!) from a Daily Kos mug. Click here to get yours now!]( - [The furore over the BBC’s Israel-Gaza coverage shows how strong and independent it needs to be]( The furore over the BBC’s Israel-Gaza coverage shows how strong and independent it needs to be, Pat Younge,The Guardian The BBC is the issue because a strong, well-funded and editorially independent BBC has never been more important for an informed democracy than it is today. But during the past few years government policy on the BBC’s future has focused on marginalising or weakening it, including questioning its impartiality and significantly eroding its funding. This policy of attacking the BBC and starving it of funds has proved to be a strategy of national self-harm. That’s how we find ourselves, in the middle of two major international conflicts, with the BBC having to make further cuts to news and current affairs budgets when it should be investing in next generation factchecking services such as BBC Verify. This is happening alongside output being slashed on television, the World Service and the decimation of truly local BBC radio, all a direct consequence of 30% cuts to the BBC’s budget since 2010. So, even though the BBC is still relied on and envied by much of the rest of the world, there should be little wonder that the people who fund it, the British public, increasingly question its ability to deliver on its historical mission. - [The White House Is Preparing for an AI-Dominated Future]( The White House Is Preparing for an AI-Dominated Future, Karen Hao and Matteo Wong, The Atlantic ...President Joe Biden signed the most sweeping set of regulatory principles on artificial intelligence in America to date: a lengthy executive order that directs all types of government agencies to make sure America is leading the way in developing the technology while also addressing the many dangers that it poses. The order explicitly pushes agencies to establish rules and guidelines, write reports, and create funding and research initiatives for AI—“the most consequential technology of our time,” in the president’s own words. [...] If the document reads like a smashing-together of papers written by completely different groups, that’s because it likely is. The president and vice president have held meetings with AI-company executives, civil-rights leaders, and consumer advocates to discuss regulating the technology, and the Biden administration published a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights before the launch of ChatGPT last November. That document called for advancing civil rights, racial justice, and privacy protections, among other things. Today’s executive order cites and expands that earlier proposal—it directly addresses AI’s demonstrated ability to contribute to discrimination in contexts such as health care and hiring, the risks of using AI in sentencing and policing, and more. These issues existed long before the arrival of generative AI, a subcategory of artificial intelligence that creates new—or at least compellingly remixed—material based on training data, but those older AI programs stir the collective imagination less than ChatGPT, with its alarmingly humanlike language. The executive order... is naturally fixated to a great extent on the kind of ultrapowerful and computationally intensive software that underpins that newer technology. At particular issue are so-called dual-use foundation models, which have also been called “frontier AI” models—a term for future generations of the technology with supposedly devastating potential. The phrase was popularized by many of the companies that intend to build these models, and chunks of the executive order match the regulatory framing that these companies have recommended. One influential policy paper from this summer, co-authored in part by staff at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, suggested defining frontier-AI models as including those that would make designing biological or chemical weapons easier, those that would be able to evade human control “through means of deception and obfuscation,” and those that are trained above a threshold of computational power. The executive order uses almost exactly the same language and the same threshold. - [Donald Trump’s Colorado ballot challenge trial begins with each side warning of an attack on democracy]( Donald Trump’s Colorado ballot challenge trial begins with each side warning of an attack on democracy, Nick Coltrain, The Denver Post Both sides of the ballot-qualification challenge cast the case as putting American democracy at stake — whether by allowing Trump to run again for the country’s highest office or, in the defense’s view, by endorsing a political charade that would rob many voters of their favored candidate. As the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination faces similar ballot challenges in several states, Colorado’s case is the first to present evidence to a judge as the plaintiffs seek to tie Trump to the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A group of Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters, backed by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed the challenge in Denver District Court. Their lawsuit seeks, based on Trump’s alleged role on Jan. 6, to bar him from the ballot under a provision of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that bars people who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office. [...] The case is unlikely to end there and could head to the state or federal Supreme Court. - [Anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. is suing Daily Kos for protecting our community. Legal fees are piling up. Can you donate $3 here to help us fight back?]( ICYMI: Popular stories from the past week you won't want to miss: - [Speaker Johnson lays out his impossible agenda]( - [Biden walked on a beach, and the RNC is all over this huge story]( - [Revenge porn lands in thousands of Virginia mailboxes courtesy of the Republican Party]( Want to write your own stories? 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