OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits “something’s clearly not working” with the artificial intelligence money that has flooded the midterm elections — and he doesn’t expect President Donald Trump’s rebrand of the technology to improve his industry’s image with the American public, either.

“I get why AI has a really negative perception right now,” Altman told Brendan Bordelon in an exclusive interview marking the launch of Decoded by POLITICO. “I don’t think spending money on politics is what’s going to make people feel better about it. The industry needs to figure out a way to address what the actual concerns are, and right now, a lot of people in the industry are being quite tone deaf.”

In the wide-ranging conversation, Altman offered a window into how OpenAI is confronting new political pressures and intensified competition with Anthropic, its corporate archrival run by former employee Dario Amodei.

Altman says OpenAI is more tolerant than Anthropic of less-than-catastrophic harms from AI, drawing out what he sees as a fundamental split in worldview between the two leading labs even as they converge on tougher rules in the wake of high-profile autonomous hacking incidents.

“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” said Altman, who characterized those harms as linked to “the lighter touch regulatory stance that we advocate for.”

Emphasis above is mine. This guy needs to be stopped.

It turns out that President Donald Trump may not have thought through all the consequences before he banned some of his most hated news outlets from the White House.

After Trump declared CNN, MS NOW, and Politico “fake news” and exiled them from the White House grounds on Friday, the other networks that make up the White House press pool—including ABC, CBS, NBC, and even Fox News—agreed to boycott their pool duties on Monday in solidarity with the banned outlets.

Lol, will it be a TACO Tuesday?

The unprecedented healthcare cuts that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party enacted last summer have impacted people in all 50 US states, stripping insurance coverage from around 8 million Americans total and wreaking havoc on hospitals and other providers nationwide.

The advocacy group Protect Our Care on Tuesday released state-by-state fact sheets detailing how many people have lost Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act coverage due to Republican policy decisions, including the party’s roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid and decision to let enhanced ACA subsidies expire, sending premiums skyrocketing.

On July 28, Democracy Forward, on behalf of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for attacking Title X funding applications. It comes as the Department for Health and Human Services, or HHS, announced that as of 2027, Title X funding would favor fertility tracking over contraceptives, counsel patients about “marriage prior to childbearing,” respect “biological reality” around sex and gender, and a slew of other funding considerations that undermine Title X’s science-backed mandate to provide accessible reproductive healthcare.

The language deployed by the HHS reflects a new wave of anti-abortion rhetoric that converges with the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, camp to increasingly demonize hormonal birth control and reproductive healthcare as “unnatural” and a symbol of moral bankruptcy. As Planned Parenthood is in its fifth year of Title X’s five-year funding cycle, the funding shift puts millions of Americans at risk.

Just over a year ago, David Hogg, then the newly-minted vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, found himself unceremoniously pushed out after he called on the party to back primary challengers to unseat members of a moribund establishment.

Now, as progressives notch victory after victory against the party’s conservative old guard and are once again galvanizing young voters thought to have been lost, the 26-year-old reformer says it proves he was right all along.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ramping up midterm travel to revive his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, armed with a carefully crafted list of popular food and fitness policies to sell — and divisive issues like vaccines to avoid.

“MAHA is a charged item tied to MAGA, but the issues that he’s really delivered victories on are popular, and we’re going to try to execute a strategy to talk, you know, really about those issues and what he’s done,” said a senior administration official, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the secretary’s midterm strategy.

Not sure Bobby Brainworm is the best standard bearer for this moment 🤣

President Donald Trump admonished justices who struck down sweeping tariffs on Friday, accusing the six members of the Supreme Court of being “afraid of doing the right thing.”

The president said at a press conference hours after the court’s ruling that he’s “ashamed” for the justices who voted against his tariffs, singling out the liberal justices who joined three conservatives in blocking the tariffs as a “disgrace to our nation.”

“The Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs is deeply disappointing, and I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed, for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” he said.

Source: a how to video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLEvK-B0Unk

Can birds even eat these???

Joe Thompson, the career U.S. Justice Department attorney best known for prosecuting social services fraud in Minnesota, has resigned along with other experienced attorneys at the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office.

The move comes after top Justice Department officials pushed the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office to investigate the widow of Renee Macklin Good, the person shot and killed last week by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, MPR News has learned.

Thompson, 47, also objected to the DOJ's decision to exclude the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation into the shooting and the department's reluctance to investigate Ross, according to a person familiar with Thompson's decision.

NEW YORK — Politicians are piling on criticism of New York City hospitals as executives scramble to weather a historic nurses strike.

Nearly 15,000 nurses walked out Monday at some of the city’s largest private hospitals — including Montefiore Medical Center and multiple New York-Presbyterian and Mount Sinai Health System locations — after months of stalled negotiations over pay raises, health insurance coverage and understaffing penalties.

The New York State Nurses Association and a host of influential political allies, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are laying the blame at hospital executives’ feet.

The Trump administration will revoke temporary protected status for thousands of Somali nationals in the United States in the face of White House claims that the diaspora community in Minnesota participated in widespread fraud, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday.

Noem told Fox News that Somalis with temporary protected status would be required to leave the country by March 17. She argued that conditions in Somalia have improved and added that “allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interest. We are putting Americans first.”

In a separate social media post, the Department of Homeland Security wrote: “Our message is clear. Go back to your own country, or we’ll send you back ourselves.”

The move would affect thousands of Somalis in the United States, though not the majority of the U.S. Somali community, many of which are already permanent residents or U.S. citizens. Yet the announcement comes as the federal government ramps up its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, the state with the largest Somali population in the United States.

Ohio gubernatorial hopeful and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy urged conservatives to reject “Groyper transgressions,” becoming the latest Republican to weigh in on the ongoing debate in the party over antisemitism.

“If, like Mr. Fuentes, you believe that Hitler was “really f-ing cool,” or if you publicly call Usha Vance a “jeet,” then you have no place in the conservative movement, period,” Ramaswamy wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday, referring to a derogatory ethnic slur against South Asians.