National Memo

CNN anchor Kasie Hunt reports President Donald Trump called into his hand-picked Kennedy Center board, shrieking orders to close the Kennedy Center unless he is allowed to put his name on the JFK Kennedy Center building. “One source told me today that the president himself called into the board meeting and yelled at members, including Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, whose lawsuit prevented the president's name from being added to the center's exterior,” reported Hunt on Tuesday. “Another source telling [us] that the heated exchange between Trump and Beatty was, ‘effing crazy,’ with the president blaming the congresswoman for getting the courts involved, saying she was responsible for the downfall of the Kennedy center, according to a person familiar with the matter.” Trump announced just moments earlier that the Kennedy center board had voted to close the cultural institution, effective immediately. The president also insisted in the post that the renovations to the center won't begin until his name is added to the building. This, after a federal judge prevented the board's latest attempt to do just that. Hunt then turned to attorney Norm Eisen, who is representing Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) in her lawsuit against the Trump administration. “President Trump and his hand-picked cronies on this board are taking the Kennedy Center hostage, and they will not allow it to thrive unless his name is placed upon it. But that's illegal. Kasey,” Eisen said. “Congresswoman Beatty has been fighting this from day one. … She stood up for the law, for the, success of the Kennedy Center. And she stood her ground as we've been doing in court. One last thing. They can vote all they want to shut it down. There is a court order that the Kennedy Center cannot be closed, uh, precisely because of these shenanigans. We're going to keep fighting until we get the Kennedy Center back on its feet — and never with Donald Trump’s name on it.” Hunt then turned to conservative panelist Scott Jennings, asking him to “help [her] understand — as the possible future White House Press Secretary,” why Trump cared about this amid rising gas prices and voter anger. “Well, I assume it's because he cares about it,” answered Jennings. “We have a president who actually cares about the arts community, cares about the Kennedy Center. There's strong documentary...closing it...documentary evidence that it needs renovations.” “But he’s closing it,” Hunt countered. “He's refusing to fund it unless they put his name on the outside of it.” “Well, it needs to be taken care of. look, he's—” “But he could take care of it without his name on it,” Hunt blared. “Look, you asked me why, and I'm telling you: It's because he cares about it,” Jennings insisted. Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet

This is a generalization, I know. As Mark Twain is said to have said, "All generalizations are false, including this one." But there is growing evidence that women tend to be more protective of our American democracy than men. They are more willing to put their foot down when partisan schemers try to game the electoral system, mostly by changing the rules or gerrymandering. A recent sign that women place more value on being a force for good comes out of conservative Utah. Both parties gerrymander, that is, draw voting district boundaries to give unfair advantage to their candidates. But a faith-based group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government wanted to stop that practice. In 2018, they backed Proposition 4, a ballot measure to create an independent districting commission that would prevent gerrymandering. It passed a statewide vote. The backstory: Utah remains solidly Republican, but its capital, Salt Lake City, has become bluer in recent years. In 2021, the Republican-run legislature drew its own congressional map that split Salt Lake County to favor their party. The women sued. It takes a certain inner steel to keep things honest when gaming the system might result in a preferred outcome. About 40 percent of the Mormon women's group are registered Republicans, and only 34 percent are Democrats. Their motivation is simply to maintain a level playing field. "Gerrymandering breaks things," the group's co-executive director Emmy Petty Adams said. "It physically fractures communities. It breaks trust." The matter has been in and out of courts, and the fight is not over. But because the Utah Supreme Court refused in February to block the new nonpartisan map, the 2026 election will be conducted under the new districts. Defenders of democratic integrity understand that safeguarding free and fair elections is the best way to guarantee the public good. It's in their interest to ensure that their votes are properly counted. It was hard to find a more conservative and politically brave House Republican than Wyoming's Liz Cheney. She voted to impeach President Donald Trump after the January 6, 2001 attack on the Capitol and did not flinch before the inevitable blowback. She was also one of only two Republicans to later serve on the House January 6 Select Committee, which investigated the violent rampage and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The other Republican was Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a decorated combat veteran. Cheney ran for another term, undoubtedly knowing that she would lose the Republican primary to Trump's revenge pick. Kinzinger retired from the House. "If I have to choose between maintaining a seat in the House of Representatives or protecting the constitutional republic," Cheney said shortly before the primary vote, "I'm going to choose the Constitution and the truth every single day." Over in the Senate, Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection. Five Republican men did join them: Richard Burr, North Carolina; Bill Cassidy, Louisiana; Mitt Romney, Utah; Ben Sasse, Nebraska; and Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania. It's important to note, however, that there were 42 male Republicans in the Senate compared with just eight female Republicans. Thus, the men voting for conviction represented only 12 percent of the male Republican caucus, while the two women represented a quarter of its female members. Four of the men subsequently retired. Cassidy remained in office, but come the primary, Trump punished him by endorsing Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA). She went on to become Louisiana's Republican Senate nominee. Cassidy gets credit for putting himself before the voters. Of course, there are plenty of unprincipled women in politics. No need to list them here. The point is that women seem more invested in keeping politics honest, as a generalization, of course. Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.

Two of U.S. President Donald Trump's close allies, special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, have been key players in negotiations with Iran during a war that has lasted for six and one-half months. But a former White House official, according to The New Yorker, is highly critical off their performance, saying they are committing "total malpractice." In The New Yorker, reporter Derek Filkins explains, "In the waning hours before the U.S. went to war with Iran, this February, Jared Kushner held a meeting with Iranian negotiators in Geneva — one last chance to avoid a conflict that would plunge the region into chaos and shock the world economy. Afterward, Kushner dismissed his counterparts as unworthy of his time. 'Lots of tricks,' he told reporters. 'They're basically playing games with us all over the place, and it's very, very slippery.'" Filkins continues, "Kushner, the boyish-looking son-in-law of Donald Trump, has been given an extraordinary brief in recent years. Along with Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy, he has been charged with ending wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and just about anywhere else they might break out. Kushner, who is 45, has little regard for the craft of diplomacy."According to New Yorker sources, Kushner and Witkoff dropped the ball badly when it came to negotiations with Iran. Filkins reports, "A former diplomat briefed on the talks with Iran told me that, when the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, began offering concessions, the two Americans failed to grasp precisely what was on the table. They sought advice from Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Grossi was attending the talks as a neutral party. A former White House official who worked on the Iranian nuclear issue was aghast at the lack of preparation: 'The Iranians come to you with a proposal. What does it actually mean? How much does it actually set them back — two months or two years? What are the work-arounds? For them not to have technical advisers there is just total malpractice." Filkins reports that at another press conference, Kushner "argued that the Iranians were merely stalling." According to the reporter, "'They were just trying to buy time in order to preserve whatever they could, to get past the term of President Trump,' he said. Another former White House official I spoke to largely shared that assessment. 'It was the same old game,' he said. 'The Iranian position is: We get a s–– ton of sanctions relief, and we do nothing to dismantle our nuclear infrastructure.' But some experts who followed the talks thought that Araghchi’s proposals were made in earnest. Among other things, the Iranians were offering to suspend nuclear enrichment entirely, which they had not done before, and to dilute the enriched uranium that they still retained." Virginia Canter, a former White House counsel, is also highly critical of Kushner's handling of Iran negotiations.Canter told The New Yorker, "Kushner is plagued with conflicts of interest. He is supposed to be working for the American people, but in fact, he has tremendous financial incentives to further the interests of his investors." Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

When Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei all tell us they are worried that their AI could do immense harm to the world, we should take notice. And when we take notice, we should remember that these are people who are known far more for their immense greed than their concern for humanity. And at least in the case of the first two, they are also world-class liars. We need to keep these facts in mind when we think about their warnings that their AI can do something catastrophic to humanity. If they really have that concern, there seems an obvious solution: shut the company down. It’s more than a bit bizarre that this option did not occur to these geniuses. Suppose a company producing fertilizer discovered that their product was a horrible carcinogen that could kill millions of people. It would be good to issue a warning to people who might have already consumed it and may have some of the fertilizer in stock, but this should go along with shutting down the company. What are we supposed to make of a fertilizer company that tells us they are producing a horrible carcinogen, but keep on belching the stuff out by the truckload? Something here doesn’t add up. I don’t doubt that there is some possibility these AIs could conceivably do something immensely destructive and maybe even lead to human extinction, but how would we rate those odds compared to something like Donald Trump getting angry at another country and starting a nuclear war? With my very limited expertise in AI, I have to believe the Trump nuclear extinction risk is far greater than the AI extinction risk. That may not calm many people, but let’s look at more likely events than total annihilation. There are a near-infinite number of catastrophes that AI could cause, which will not destroy humanity but will almost certainly wipe out the company immediately responsible, as well as the other less-than-innocent bystanders. To throw out a few examples, suppose an AI system eats a bank or insurance company’s records in a way that they are almost impossible to reconstruct. Millions, or even tens of millions of people, may find the record of their accounts have vanished, or that getting their healthcare paid for is now an incredibly time-consuming burden, and maybe not even possible at all. Alternatively, imagine an AI system captures a city’s traffic control system and starts to play games with stoplights at major intersections, leading to a flood of high-speed crashes. Or maybe one takes over an air traffic control system and randomly tells planes when it’s okay to take off or land. Hopefully these scenarios are unlikely, but surely they are more likely than Elon Musk’s AI system going rogue (or maybe following orders) and systematically sending out robots to kill off any human they encounter. In these and many other disaster stories, the AI company involved would surely be pushed into bankruptcy due to lawsuits, and the top executives involved may well face criminal liability. The other AI companies would almost certainly face a similar fate as the risks of AI would become clear to even hedge fund and private equity partners. Insofar as there is anything real in the AI gang of three’s warnings, this disastrous but non-extinction risk is almost certainly the issue. They presumably want the government to in some way protect them from liability for the damage they may potentially cause. If the point is simply to say that they have decided their systems are too dangerous to operate, they always have the incredibly simple solution available to them: shut them down. This might mean they are no longer absurdly rich, but them’s the breaks. It also should be mentioned that these warnings are another way to advertise that they have super-sophisticated AI that can do amazing things; even destroy humanity. That may not be true, but it could be a good way to excite increasingly skeptical investors, especially as Anthropic and OpenAI are looking to do IPOs in the near future. Of course, if the AI boys can get members of Congress sufficiently excited by their extinction warnings, they may be able to arrange new government regulation. This regulation would undoubtedly come with a heaping dose of subsidies for an industry that may never be profitable. Human extinction may be awful in the real world, but threatening it may be the best thing that ever happened to the AI industry. Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer*. Please consider subscribing to his* Substack, from which this is reprinted with permission.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have spent the last few months bragging that they’ve decimated Iran’s ballistic missile capability. But a new report says otherwise. According to The Wall Street Journal, intelligence sources said that Iran is back to producing ballistic missiles at several underground sites, including the Khojir facility in the southeastern region of the country. They also said that Iran is currently attempting to build new underground assembly facilities. When Trump first started the war in March, he and his team quickly claimed that Iran’s capabilities had been destroyed following U.S. bombing runs. That claim kicked off a pattern that has gone on for months, with the Trump administration insisting that Iran has been pacified and that victory is just around the corner. But in reality, Iran has fought back, killing people and asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz, leading to rising fuel costs. In April, Trump specifically said that the U.S. military had “beaten and completely decimated Iran.” But within two days, Iran shot down a U.S. fighter jet. Trump was back at it again on Wednesday, telling reporters that Iran “can’t hold out any longer” and that signs of strength from Iran are a ploy to “get a nice, weak group of people in there” ahead of the midterms. The Iran war has been a constant problem for Trump—and it’s all of his own making. He and the GOP were already unpopular thanks to mass deportations and healthcare cuts, but the war and its death toll and effect on the economy has Republicans scrambling. The Journal’s report undermines one of Trump’s central arguments about the war: that the goal was to cut off Iran’s access to weapons. It also exposes the falsehood of his claims about “decimating” Iran. No wonder he’s now trying to bribe voters. Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos