The Conservative Political Action Conference, the New York Times reported on Saturday, is not what it used to be. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis skipped out on what has for years been the conservative movement’s premier cattle call. Mike Pence will be at a donor retreat instead. Fox News will not be streaming the event, nor will its popular hosts be speaking from the stage. Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the event, was recently accused by a Republican campaign aide of groping, and his star is, it’s fair to say, somewhat diminished.

But if CPAC has fallen from its pedestal, it remains a useful barometer for gauging where the conservative base is, and where it is headed. And the future, right now, looks grim as hell.

Here’s Michael Knowles, a commentator at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, receiving a loud cheer for saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.”

Michael Knowles tells CPAC that "there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. … Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." https://t.co/57hJF4frgq pic.twitter.com/szvnC1qWrP

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 4, 2023

Donald Trump has been running for president for more than three months, but it has sometimes been easy to forget. Fox News, which lent him an endless supply of on-air advertising during his last two campaigns, has all but blacklisted him, offering hours of free programming instead to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Although Elon Musk’s Twitter reinstated the former president’s account, Trump is still posting his half-baked thoughts on his preferred social-media site, Truth Social, instead. There is just a lot less of Trump in the news these days, which is good for most people—who frankly deserve a break—but is perhaps of a troubling sign for a man who has been powered by publicity for most of his adult life. 

What is the point of a third Trump campaign, beyond settling an (admittedly quite large and ever growing) number of scores? What is “The Wall,” now that he’s already built one? On Friday, Politico offered a glimpse at Trump’s new policy direction: He’s going to become an urbanist. 

Per Politico:

​​Trump’s plan…calls for holding a contest to design and create up to ten new “Freedom Cities,” built from the ground up on federal land. It proposes an investment in the development of vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles; the creation of “hives of industry” sparked by cutting off imports from China; and a population surge sparked by “baby bonuses” to encourage would-be-parents to get on with procreation. It is all, his team says, part of a larger nationwide beautification campaign meant to inspire forward-looking visions of America’s future.

Futuristic cities on federal land with flying cars. No notes!

Earlier this week, Florida State Sen. Jason Brodeur introduced a bill that would require bloggers to register with the state government when they are paid to write about the governor and other political figures. After registering, bloggers would be forced to file monthly reports listing every one of their posts, how much they were paid for them, and where the money came from. Those who fail to do so could be fined up to $2,500 for each missing report.

That sounded like something that might have originated elsewhere. Florida’s blogger registration bill is curiously similar to a section of a Hungarian law that requires media organizations to register with the government. The law, which was passed at the start of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tenure in 2010, initially required news outlets to register before beginning to publish. (After blowback from the European Union and press freedom groups, it was amended in 2011 so that media organizations have to register within 60 days of starting up.) Could it be a basis for the proposed Florida law?

It wouldn’t be the first time Florida looked to Hungary. Orbán’s authoritarian government is in vogue on the American right and its illiberalism has already served as a template for Gov. Ron DeSantis and fellow Florida Republicans. The state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay Law” was reportedly modeled in part on similar Hungarian legislation. And Rod Dreher, a right-wing figure who lives in Budapest, explained during an interview last year that a reporter told him they had “talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”

There are also parallels between Orbán and DeSantis’ efforts to push universities to the right. In 2018, for example, Orbán banned gender studies programs at universities. Last week, Florida Rep. Alex Andrade, a DeSantis ally, introduced a bill that would bar public universities from offering the major. Steve Bannon has called Orbán “one of the great moral leaders in this world.”

Still, Brodeur did not respond to a request for comment on where he had gotten the idea for his potential blogger registration law.

LIV Golf advertises itself as “Golf but louder.” Since its debut last year, LIV (which is not an acronym; it’s a Roman numeral) has sought to take over the market from the PGA Tour by playing music over the loudspeakers during tournaments, shooting t-shirts into the crowd, cozying up to Donald Trump, and—mostly—paying famous golfers disgusting sums of money to compete at their events.

But unless you’re really into the idea of rock-and-roll golf, the story of LIV is the money behind it— the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, a nation that in recent years has used investments in international sporting events as a form of soft power. With nation-state backing, and a nation-state’s incentives, LIV can basically print money for as long as it wants, and the PGA views it as an existential threat. The PGA barred golfers who compete at LIV events from also competing at PGA events, and in response, 11 LIV golfers filed an antitrust lawsuit against the organization last August. In January, the PGA filed its own lawsuit against the PIF, seeking to depose the fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, who is also a minister in the Saudi government. The PIF claimed that it and al-Rumayyan were protected by “sovereign immunity.” A judge sided with the PGA. 

All of which is interesting even if you don’t really care about golf; the lawsuit over the Saudi state investment fund’s attempt to blow up an American sports monopoly could yield some pretty interesting stuff, and the LIV–PGA war has already taken on a pronounced political vibe. (Do you know who’s running comms for LIV? It’s Ari Fleischer!) But what’s really noteworthy about the “sovereign immunity” claim on behalf of the PIF and al-Rumayyan is that it’s seemingly the opposite of what the Saudis argued in 2021, when the PIF acquired a majority stake in the English soccer club Newcastle United. 

Back then, the Premier League went to great lengths to assure critics that Newcastle would be wholly independent of any national entity. At the time the PIF made its first bid, as leaders of a consortium that also included the British investor Amanda Stavely, the Saudis were engaged in an economic blockade of Qatar, and the rival Gulf state lodged a formal complaint seeking to block the takeover. It accused Saudi Arabia of pirating Premier League broadcasts—for which the Qatari-owned network, beIN Sports, had spent half a billion dollars for the regional broadcast rights. The bid fell through. The Guardian reported at the time that the Premier League considered the PIF a part of the Saudi state, and it believed that the Saudi piracy of Premier League games therefore violated the league’s rules that prospective owners can’t participate in activities that would be illegal in the UK.

Saudi Arabia eventually got out of beIN’s way, and the consortium moved to buy the club again, but there was still the elephant in the room: The PIF is a sovereign wealth fund, and its chairman, Muhammed bin Salman is, well, the sovereign. And MBS is not just any head of state; according to the US government, he personally ordered the murder of a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in Turkey in 2018. His role, and his government’s horrific human rights record, was a major issue at the time.

Tina Peters, the former Colorado election official who has been charged with election fraud, could be going to jail for obstructing a government operation.

Peters made national headlines last year when she pleaded not guilty to numerous felonies related to her alleged participation in a scheme to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. In her position as Mesa County clerk, Peters allegedly attempted to copy software from voting machines in a ploy that allowed sensitive voter information to wind up online.

While under indictment, she launched an unsuccessful run for Colorado Secretary of State. Peters finished third, but is hoping for better luck in her ongoing bid for chair of the state Republican Party. In the unlikely event that Peters were to win the March 11 election, she could spend a some of the two-year term behind bars.

On Friday, Peters was found guilty of obstructing government operations, a charge that stemmed from her February 2022 refusal to hand over an iPad that prosecutors say she had used to videotape a court hearing. Officers had a warrant to seize the iPad. Peters was acquitted of another charge of obstructing a peace officer. Body cam footage of Peters’ arrest at a Grand Junction, Colorado, bagel shop shows Peters repeatedly yelling, “Let go of me!” as officers attempt to handcuff her.

Tina Peters Arrest 2-8-22
Synched with Police Bodycam pic.twitter.com/hiWePelBKl

In early February, days after a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals including vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate and isobutylene derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, authorities opted to burn off the materials to avoid an explosion. This prompted an evacuation of residents close to the site and images seen around the world of thick black smoke rising over homes and farmland.

When residents in the town of 4,700 returned, many complained of headaches, skin irritation, and respiratory issues. More than 43,000 aquatic animals were found dead in creeks within five miles of the derailment. While officials maintain that the air, water, and soil is safe, residents fear what longterm effects might lay ahead.

One concern is that the burning vinyl chloride may have produced dioxins that could linger in and around local homes and farmland. The compounds, which can take decades to fully break down, can cause cancer, interfere with hormones, and cause damage to reproductive and immune systems. The EPA on Thursday ordered Norfolk Southern to test the area for dioxins.

Michelle Graef, who lives three miles from the derailment, saw her livelihood dry up overnight. Now, she fears, no one will want to stay at any of the five Airbnb listings on her property, where guests get to ride horses and eat fresh eggs and blueberries she grows. She dreads the delivery of a cabin she recently purchased for upwards of $80,000 to expand her short-term rental income—she can no longer afford the price.

Audrey DeSanzo lives paycheck-to-paycheck within one mile of the derailment with her 9- and 10-year-old daughters. She says she wants to leave as soon as possible, but with her $14-a-hour job, lacks sufficient resources to relocate. On a recent school night, she debated whether to send her 10-year-old daughter, Nevaeh, back to school after keeping her home for the day. Nevaeh has been suffering from headaches, stomachaches, and congestion, since they returned to East Palestine. Was the air safer at home—or at school?

In a scathing letter to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Norfolk Southern worker and Teamsters union rep denounced the rail company’s cost-cutting business model, alleging that workers who were deployed to clean up February’s vinyl chloride spill have experienced adverse health effects.

“I am writing to share with you the level of disregard that Norfolk Southern has for the safety of the railroad’s Workers, its track structure, and East Palestine and other American communities where NS operates,” Jonathon Long, who said he had been employed with Norfolk Southern for 28 years, wrote. “I am also imploring you as the Governor of the State of Ohio to use your influence and power to stop NS’s reckless business practices that endanger the public and their Workers.”

Concerns about Norfolk Southern’s cost-cutting, anti-labor policies have been spreading for weeks, but Long’s letter paints the most vivid picture yet of the company’s apparent disregard for its workers’ safety. In the letter, Long identified the implementation of “precision scheduled railroading,” or PSR, a system that he says involves increasing the lengths of trains while slashing the number of employees, as one of the primary ways that the company has prioritized profit over the safety and well-being of its workers. “The new business model of PSR is implemented by freight rail carriers not to benefit America’s supply chain through the timely delivery of good,” he wrote, “but solely for the advancement of railroad executives, shareholders, and Wall Street hedge fund investors in the form of record profits, dividends, and stock buybacks.”

In addition to systemic issues, Long criticized Norfolk Southern’s immediate response to the spill of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. Long wrote that workers assigned to clean up the spill were not provided personal protective equipment and that many “continue to experience migraines and nausea, days after the derailment, and they all suspect that they were willingly exposed to these chemicals at the direction of NS.” (Norfolk Southern insisted in a statement to CNBC that “hazardous material professionals…were on site continuously to ensure the work area was safe to enter and the required PPE was utilized.”)

Following the letter, leaders of 12 rail unions met with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Federal Railroad Administration administrator Amit Bose in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. In addition to paid sick leave, the unions are fighting for regulatory changes to ensure railroad safety.

A Republican lawmaker has filed a bill that, if passed, would, apparently, eliminate Florida’s Democratic Party.

On Tuesday, Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia filed the “Ultimate Cancel Act“—a bill that doesn’t mention the Democrats by name but would require the state’s Division of Elections to “immediately cancel” the filings and official status of any political party whose platform had “previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”

Democrats, especially in the South, supported slavery up to and then during the Civil War. The Democrat party backed Jim Crow laws for decades following emancipation. Famously, the so-called “Southern strategy” saw whites in the South, aggrieved by the Civil Rights Movement, courted by the Republican party.

Hey @NikkiFried…Florida Dems should be thankful I’m not asking them to return all the money they’ve raised previously from their Jefferson/Jackson Dinners. @BrendonLeslie @PeterSchorschFL @Mdixon55 @fineout @NEWSMAX @FoxNews

— Blaise Ingoglia (@GovGoneWild) February 28, 2023

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out. And please also check out David’s new New York Times bestseller, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.

Freedom—it’s what Republicans and conservatives have long insisted they care most about. At campaign rallies and conservative shindigs, they get all weepy when Lee Greenwood sings, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” For decades, they have accused their political foes of seeking to destroy freedom by imposing socialism, communism, Bolshevism, collectivism, or whatever upon the US of A. This has been a ruse. The right has often been an enemy of freedom. For instance, conservatives have sought to limit the reproductive choices of women and prevent Americans from marrying the people they love. In recent weeks, we have seen a very specific assault on freedom in Florida waged by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is not yet a 2024 presidential candidate but who already seems to be competing with Donald Trump for the GOP leader most committed to authoritarianism—and who yesterday released a book with a highly ironic title: The Courage to Be Free.

Last week, two bills were introduced in the Florida legislature that would advance DeSantis’ crusade and limit important freedoms for Floridians. The first continues DeSantis’ long-running attack on the Sunshine State’s education system, which has included banning math textbooks that he claimed included “woke” ideology, prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, thwarting the introduction of an AP African American studies course (and threatening to kill all AP courses), and deriding “liberal indoctrination” in the school system. The laws he has already passed have led to book banning in some school districts.

This new measure would block public colleges and universities from offering major or minor degrees in gender studies, intersectionality, or critical race studies. (Several Florida schools offer gender studies majors; it’s unclear whether any does so for critical race theory.) The measure also would compel colleges to offer general education classes that do not “suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics.” These courses must “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization.”

This legislation, filed by GOP state Rep. Alex Andrade, a DeSantis ally, establishes the state government as an education censor, preventing schools, faculty, and students from determining the contours of college education. Andrew Gothard, president of United Faculty of Florida, the union representing instructors at Florida schools, described the bill to Higher Ed Dive as a state-sponsored form of indoctrination. He called it “fascism in its purest form.”

Using Coinbase to facilitate racism and hate is apparently no longer against the cryptocurrency platform’s rules under little-noticed revisions the company made to its terms of service several years ago. 

Until August 2021, the “Prohibited Uses” section of Coinbase’s user agreement banned customers from wielding the platform to “incite, threaten, facilitate, promote, or encourage hate, racial intolerance, or violent acts against others.” That month, Coinbase stripped that section from the agreement.

“Coinbase quietly removing hate speech and racism clauses from its terms of service sends a clear message: Coinbase does not care about the safety and well-being of Black people who use their site,” said an emailed statement from Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, a vice president at Color Of Change, a civil rights group focused on inequity and technology. “Without strong content moderation policies, Coinbase will continue to put Black consumers, their own employees and stakeholders in harm’s way in order to enact a long broken vision for Big Tech.”

Coinbase’s move to strip its user agreement of language explicitly barring hate took place about a year after the company, amid national racial justice protests, banned internal discussion of nominally external political issues and promptly faced public accusations of racism from Black employees.

Financial tech companies, including both PayPal and Square, often have language in their user agreement policies banning their use to promote “hate” or “racial intolerance.” White nationalist Richard Spencer, for example, was banned from receiving money on Paypal in 2017 following the violent Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virgina. Prominent Islamaphobe Laura Loomer has also been banned from the digital payments platform.

The water level at Lake Powell, the massive reservoir on the Colorado River whose southern reaches straddle the Utah-Arizona border, hit a record low this week, sinking to just 3,522 feet above sea level. A 23-year megadrought combined with climate change has left the reservoir at just 22 percent of its capacity—so low that it threatens to cause the collapse of a water supply system serving 40 million people throughout the arid west.

Created by the 1963 construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell is the nation’s second-largest reservoir. Over the past year, federal officials have ordered emergency water releases from upstream reservoirs, such as Utah’s Flaming Gorge, to prop up the lake and keep the dam’s turbines turning and providing electricity. While this year’s above average snowpack may help, even the Bureau of Reclamation, which historically has wildly overestimated the Colorado River’s flow, expects Lake Powell to drop another 30 feet by September.

One underappreciated element of this looming crisis is Glen Canyon Dam itself. If the water level in Lake Powell falls another 150 feet from its current level, the reservoir will hit dead pool, meaning that the Colorado River will no longer run through the dam, stopping flow to booming populations in Arizona and Nevada, as well as to Mexico and the agricultural areas of California’s Imperial Valley.

“Lake Powell is quickly approaching the point at which it may soon become physically impossible to pass enough water through the dam,” warned an August report by regional environmental groups. “Such an event would likely be the most calamitous in the Colorado River System’s history, causing legal complications, economic harm, and a water supply crisis across the seven states and Mexico.”

Environmentalists have long hated the Glen Canyon Dam, which submerged beautiful canyons, caused environmental degradation, and harmed endangered fish in the Grand Canyon. Edward Abbey’s landmark novel The Monkey Wrench Gang was based on a plot to blow up the structure.

Former President Jimmy Carter has decided to begin hospice care in his Plains, Georgia home. The news was disclosed on Saturday in a brief statement from the Carter Center:

After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention. He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.

Carter is America’s longest-lived former president. After leaving the White House in 1981, he forged a remarkable second career as a statesmen and human rights advocate—not to mention Habitat for Humanity volunteer and Sunday school instructor. He turned 98 in October.

“You’re in!” the email said. “Welcome to the new Bing!” Last Sunday, I joined a small wave of users granted early access to Microsoft’s new chatbot backed search engine, put forward as an “AI-powered copilot for the web.” Given that “multiple millions” across 169 countries were stuck on the waitlist, I felt like Charlie waving a Golden Ticket. Little did I know that I, like Roald Dahl’s beloved character, would too be led by a mercurial and untrustworthy host into a world of pure imagination.

I have already spent months awe-struck by the new Bing’s underlying technology. It also powers ChatGPT, the wildly popular interface created by OpenAI, a lab backed by billions of Microsoft bucks. Since its founding in 2015 (co-chair: Elon Musk), OpenAI’s algorithms have devoured astonishing amounts of data to learn the intricacies of language, enabling programs to generate human-like responses—translations, summaries, essays, workout and recipe plans, sonnets… whatever you like. ChatGPT is a great party trick. It’s also a powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks, or composing a bloodless email. It can function as a teacher, coder, or wedding planner. (I used it to proofread this paragraph.) But for all its potential, any user will tell you that it can deceive with the ease of George Santos.

I had my first chance to chat with Bing at length during two recent cross-country flights. At first, it was marvelous. To test how specific it could get, I asked Bing to provide a timeline of the development of China’s J-series fighter jet, complete with quotes from allies and enemies. Its answers were detailed and conveniently embroidered with links and references. I also learned how to write a lease renegotiation email, using templates, and with reference to New York City’s current rules. I asked it to locate my most recent Mother Jones article and to summarize it. Bing got this last task wrong several times, but I nudged it in the right direction, and eventually we got there.

But the more I ventured into this Willy Wonka-esque wonderland, the more I noticed strange inconsistencies, glimpses of Bing’s wiring, and dangerously convincing falsehoods.

Upon closer examination of our conversations about Chinese fighter jets, I discovered that I couldn’t independently find any of the direct quotes it presented. The chatbot quoted former Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell as saying, “it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are testing it,” linking an article in The Diplomat. But Bing was deep-faking Morrell: He doesn’t appear anywhere in that story. In fact, I couldn’t find any proof that Morrell ever said these words, even using Bing’s regular search interface. (Or Google’s.) Likewise, quotes from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former top Indian military chief, and a journalist, all appeared to be made up. This was an utterly convincing but ultimately synthetic history about a very real arms race between superpowers. What could go wrong?

On Friday evening, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the “breaking” news that father would visit East Palestine, Ohio, next week, in the wake of the train derailment there whose aftermath has cloaked the region in a toxic cloud, killed thousands of fish, and required the evacuation of residents who fear longterm health risks. 

Breaking News: Trump will visit East Palestine, Ohio next week.
If our “leaders” are too afraid to actually lead real leaders will step up and fill the void.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 18, 2023

On Saturday, the former president himself claimed, with no evidence, that news of his planned visit had prompted the Biden administration to finally send a disaster relief team to the beleaguered city. 

On Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris told an international security gathering that the United States has formally determined that Russian forces have committed “crimes against humanity” during their invasion of Ukraine.

“Let us be clear: Russian forces have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population,” she told an audience gathered in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. “Gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape and deportation. Executions, killings, beatings and electrocution. Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russia, including children.”

“In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt: These are crimes against humanity,” Harris said, according to the Washington Post.

While President Biden labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal” in March, shortly after he ordered troops to assault his neighbor, US officials moved to downplay the statement, saying that experts were still collecting evidence and weighing it against international law. While Harris’ statement did not specifically mention the Russian leader’s culpability, she committed the US to press consequences for those responsible.

“I say to all those who have perpetrated these crimes and to their superiors who are complicit in these crimes: You will be held to account,” she said, according to the New York Times.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC sentenced a veteran GOP operative to 18 months in prison for funneling $25,000 from a Russian businessman to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Jesse Benton, a longtime aide to both Ron and Rand Paul, was convicted in November on six related charges. The court found that he and another GOP operative accepted $100,000 from Roman Vasilenko, a St. Petersburg-based influencer who wanted photos with Trump to display on his social media accounts. Benton kept most of the money for himself but donated $25,000 to the Republican National Committee as part of a plan to secure two tickets to a fundraising event for Trump in Philadelphia. At the event, Vasilenko was allowed to sit close to Trump at a roundtable discussion and later took a photo with him. Foreign nationals, like Vasilenko, are not allowed to donate to US political campaigns or committees, and it is illegal to make a donation on behalf of someone else. 

Benton, who is married to Ron Paul’s grandaughter, was previously convicted in 2016 of a scheme to pay an Iowa state senator to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul ahead of the state’s 2012 republican presidential caucus. In that case, Benton, after pleading that he had reformed and had a family to support, was sentenced to home confinement. Just six days later, the Trump fundraiser at which Vasilenko met Trump took place. A few weeks after that, Benton was caught in an undercover sting orchestrated by the British newspaper The Telegraph, whose reporters posed as representatives of a Chinese businessman who wanted to donate $2 million to Trump’s campaign. Benton told them he could arrange it. He apparently violated the terms of his home confinement in the Iowa case to meet with the undercover reporters.

In a letter submitted to the judge before his sentencing this week, Benton said he had suffered enormously in the face of federal investigations over the last eight years, which he said had nearly bankrupted him and ruined his good name. Benton wrote that he currently delivers for DoorDash to make ends meet, and, in asking for more home confinement instead of prison time, argued that being separated from his family would be painful for them, including his young daughter. In pleading for leniency, Benton cited his Christianity and claimed he was no longer involved with politics. (In 2016, he had also pointed to his faith and claimed to be out of the business.)

At Benton’s sentencing hearing Friday, U.S. District Court judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump-appointee whose light sentences of January 6 defendants have been controversial, was not in the mood for Benton’s argument. 

The Torah tells its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do.

It wasn’t easy. First, she endured three years of infertility. Then, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 in vitro fertilization (IVF) journey, during which they had to discard four embryos before implantation because of genetic abnormalities. Finally, in April 2019, Sobel delivered a healthy baby girl. Immediately after, she began hemorrhaging and almost died.

Now 38, Sobel wants to have another child. It’s not the IVF process or her birth trauma that’s holding her back. Instead, she says the anti-abortion laws Kentucky enacted in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision prevent her from getting pregnant in a manner that complies with her religious views. It’s why she and two other Jewish women—both of whom also depend on IVF to conceive—are suing the state of Kentucky on the grounds that its laws are vague, difficult to understand, and that they violate their religious freedoms under Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which stipulates that the “government shall not substantially burden a person’s freedom of religion.”

Kentucky’s abortion laws are so unclear, Sobel’s lawyers say, that it would be reasonable to infer it is a crime to discard unneeded or genetically imperfect embryos, a common outcome in IVF. The laws allow no exceptions for situations in which a fetus has a fatal medical condition yet still has a heartbeat, which would go against the plaintiffs’ religious belief that an abortion to prevent the physical suffering of a child or the mental anguish of a mother is justified. The laws are also somewhat contradictory when it comes to what steps a physician can take if a pregnant person’s life is in danger. One statute says abortion would be permitted only if a mother faces a serious risk of “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” or death; another requires physicians to “make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of the unborn.”

Doctors who fail to abide by these convoluted statutes risk monetary fines, the loss of their medical licenses, and prison time; pregnant people whose doctors are confused by the statutes risk death. Multiple pregnant women have almost died as a result of having incomplete miscarriages in several other states with similarly confusing abortion laws that prompted medical professionals to delay their care. Sobel, who bled during her first pregnancy and required emergency blood transfusions after delivering her daughter, fears she could face a similar fate. Even though her faith clearly prescribes that a mother’s life takes precedence over her fetus, Kentucky’s laws are more ambiguous.

Tesla just realized that testing “self-driving” vehicle technology on public roads isn’t such a good idea, after all.

Today, the automaker recalled nearly 363,000 cars equipped with its “Full Self-Driving” technology after a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the Autosteer feature “led to an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety based on insufficient adherence to traffic safety laws,” the Associated Press reports.

According to NHTSA, it sounds like FSD is bad at many of the crucial elements of driving, such as stopping, turning, and changing speeds:

The FSD Beta system may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections, such as traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop, or proceeding into an intersection during a steady yellow traffic signal without due caution. In addition, the system may respond insufficiently to changes in posted speed limits or not adequately account for the driver’s adjustment of the vehicle’s speed to exceed posted speed limits.

As I’ve written previously, FSD has been linked to multiple deaths. While Elon Musk has claimed that the software operates “better than a person,” Tesla’s website clarifies that the vehicles are not fully autonomous.

Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for Daniel Werfel, President Biden’s nominee for IRS commissioner, though not nearly so contentious as it might have been, hinted at partisan battles to come over America’s most beloved federal agency. 

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden commenced the hearing by calling out America’s “two-tiered” tax system—one set of rules for most of us, another for big companies, superwealthy folks, and their complex and seldom-audited business partnerships.

Werfel pledged to tackle the agency’s audit imbalance, wherein a kneecapped IRS came to over-rely on “correspondence audits” of low and moderate earners and less on very high-earners whose tax filings tend to be exceedingly complex—often deliberately so. In 2018, for example, the IRS audited virtually zero partnerships—which include law and accounting firms, real-estate partnerships, hedge funds, private equity firms, and the like.

As I wrote in my 2021 book, Jackpot, the gutting of the agency’s enforcement budget by Republican lawmakers during the 2010s “resulted in an exodus of experienced auditors, people with the expertise required to decode the financial voodoo of the wealthiest taxpayers and their deliberately opaque partnerships. (It can ‘take months to identify the person who rep­resents the partnership,’ IRS auditors told the Government Account­ability Office in 2014.)”

The need for more IRS scrutiny of super-rich tax avoiders was among the primary reasons that the Democrats included close to $80 billion in new funding for the agency (over 10 years) in the Inflation Reduction Act. House Republicans have already voted to repeal most of that funding, more than half of which is slated for tougher tax enforcement, with the rest going to things like oversight, improved customer service, and an overhaul of the IRS’s seriously outdated tech capabilities.

President Biden on Thursday, in his most detailed remarks addressing the recent spate of aerial objects that were shot down over North American skies, said that there is no evidence tying the three unidentified objects to foreign surveillance programs. Officials, however, are still working on confirming the exact details of the objects and their provenance.

“The Intelligence agency’s current assessment is that these three objects were balloons tied to private companies, recreational groups, or research institutions,” Biden said in a brief televised address. The president also defended shooting down a suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this month, a dramatic action that has since inflamed tensions between the two countries.

“We seek competition, not conflict with China. We’re not looking for a new Cold War,” Biden said. “But I make no apologies and we will compete.”

Since taking down the objects, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have demanded answers. But in recent days, there has been growing consensus that they were likely benign in origin, almost certainly not evidence of aliens, and perhaps even belonging to hobby groups simply enthusiastic for “pico balloons.”

“We acted out of an abundance of caution and with an opportunity that allowed us to take down these objects safely,” Biden said on Thursday.