Elon Musk promotes himself as an avatar of free speech on X, the platform he runs that used to be Twitter. But I wonder if Mr .Musk and his operation are what James Madison had in mind when he spearheaded the drive that codified free speech in the First Amendment? The First Amendment to the Constitution is aptly named for being the most important. I share that sentiment. Its’ wording is a bit out-of-step for a world where most people get their news from X or TikTok or some other social media platform. Nevertheless, the amendment’s meaning is as vital as when Virginia became the required eleventh state to ratify the nation’s Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791. The vote seared into law the basic rights that distinguish America from any nation across the globe.

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Polls suggest the economy remains the top issue for voters in the coming election, and what happened at the Federal Reserve Wednesday will have a far more immediate impact on voters than the vague economic policies that both candidates for the White House embrace in their campaigns. Both former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris tout budgetary game plans containing holes as big as Yankee Stadium. Neither, for instance, detail how they will finance the tax cuts they embrace without increasing the soaring national debt, which has surged under Republican and Democratic administrations over the past decade or two. Indeed, the decision by Jerome Powell and his six colleagues on the Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rates by one-half percent will impact how much American voters pay to buy everything from cars and homes to the returns they earn on their savings and the interest charges on credit cards. The effects are immediate.

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The distraction duo is in full swing and floundering. Donald Trump is saying he will nominate his new soulmate, Elon Musk, to lead a government efficiency commission if the former president is elected in November. The announcement demonstrates something more sinister: Both men excel at floating attention-grabbing stories in the media to distract the public from other more serious problems they would rather not discuss. Trump’s troubles involve the burden of deflecting attention from the wobbly footings of his White House campaign. He’s now the old guy in the race, pining for the days he was running against Joe Biden. The last thing he wants is for anyone to focus on the same signs of cognitive decline that drove Biden to drop out and endorse Kamala Harris, his Vice President and the younger candidate in the race.

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The Republican Party has converted the voter suppression operation it clumsily tried in the last presidential election into a more polished fraudulent scheme that could mean the 2024 election won’t be over with a vote count. Democratic political operatives, caught off guard by the sophistication of a low-profile GOP voter suppression movement, recently created Democracy Defenders, a Super PAC led by Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign manager in 2012. Messina has raised $10 million to fight Republican efforts to deny the vote to vulnerable populations that favor Democrats. You probably haven’t heard too much about this in the news. The action has evolved out of the spotlight in courthouses and esoteric state offices that are lightly covered because local media that once reported on this kind of news barely exists anymore.

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That Harris' nomination to the top of the ticket came in Chicago is apt. The city is the most American of all metropolises with its diverse mosaic of Polish, Latino, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Black, and White neighborhoods that are greater than the sum of the parts. The roots of most Chicagoans trace to immigrants just like the ones who are a major campaign issue for Harris and her opponent. Like any candidate for public office, Harris can learn many lessons from the city of grit and hustle. She was nominated in a place that has played a central role in shaping the nation’s constantly changing political narrative, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The Democratic Convention of 2024 marked the twenty-sixth time a political party has gathered in the city to nominate someone for the highest office in the land. The promise and peril that often started in Chicago demonstrate how things that start well don’t always end that way.

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One sign all’s not well in the AI world: the recent stock market rout in which traders bailed from high-flying tech stocks like Nividia, fearful that AI mania obscenely inflated the true value of the maker of chips needed for AI. There are other signs of trouble, too. Fake news stories in the media are nothing new. Stories with doctored photos and text have been around since the days of yellow journalism popularized by icons like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The Wall Street Journal’s reporters found that AI takes fake news to a new level, making it “trivially easy to splice together clips and write and voice scripts at little cost.”

“Anyone with five dollars and a credit card can do this,” Jack Stubbs, chief intelligence officer of the research firm Graphika, told the Journal’s reporters.

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The consensus about Trump’s false comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’ ethnicity that came up during a recent lunch I had with a group of Chicago political pros. Together, they have decades of experience running, writing about, and working on campaigns ranging from aldermanic and mayoral races all the way up the political food chain. Trump appeared before Black journalists in Chicago and accused Vice President Kamala Harris of suddenly discovering her Black roots to bolster her White House campaign, a patently false allegation. Harris has long and proudly touted her Black and Asian heritage in many campaigns. She’s no Black-come-lately. The question that surfaced over salads and drinks at a local pub was this: Did Trump’s insulting remarks amount to a slip of the tongue or a calculated comment designed to divert attention from his age?

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“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his social media platform. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they are saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” The Heritage Foundation, too, denies any ties between its blueprint and the Trump ticket. It says it has produced a conservative wish list for the next president, regardless of who wins the election. Many critics don’t buy Trump's or Heritage’s claims, though, and for good reasons. First, how can Trump call some of the project’s proposals “abysmal” if he “knows nothing” about it? Trump also has a problem with the pen of his running mate, J. D. Vance. The GOP vice presidential nominee wrote a forward to a book entitled “Dawn’s Early Light Taking Back Washington to Save America” by Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and prime force behind the mandate.

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If history is a guide, Harris faces a steep climb. Of the nation’s forty-nine vice presidents, only four have been elected president. Nine vice presidents lost elections to succeed the president under which they served only after their presidents died, were assassinated or resigned, as President Richard Nixon did in 1974. Succeeding the boss is not impossible. The pundits considered Vice President Harry Truman a long shot to defeat Thomas Dewey in 1948. But Truman traveled over 22,000 miles by rail delivering speeches. Running against the Republican-controlled "do-nothing" eightieth Congress, Truman resonated with many voters dissatisfied with partisan gridlock. Sound familiar? He scored a historic political comeback to become the nation’s thirty-third president.

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The Oxford Dictionary defines dementia as a “condition characterized by progressive or persistent loss of intellectual functioning, especially with impairment of memory and abstract thinking, and often with personality change, resulting from organic disease of the brain.” I doubt that any doctor would officially diagnose either President Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the former president and convicted felon trying to unseat Biden, with dementia yet. But both candidates display the creeping signs of cognitive decline characteristic of almost anyone who lives to be eighty-one or seventy-eight, the respective ages of the candidates. And they are running for a four-year term in which cognitive decline could easily slip into dementia.

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James Franklin, elder brother of Benjamin Franklin, launched the nation’s first newspaper crusade as the editor of the New England Courant, one of the few American newspapers that existed in 1721. Fast forward to 2024 and we see another crusade, even if it’s not called one: The New York Times’s drive to convince President Biden that he’s no longer up to the job. The crusading newspaper is a fixture of the nation’s media landscape as old as America and the Stars and Stripes. The campaigns can be wrong on facts, misguided, or even unscrupulous, but they usually embody the voice in the room that few want to hear.

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What we witnessed last night wasn’t a debate — it was a reality TV show. It’s no secret that President Joe Biden performed badly, while former President Donald was in his element. The nation needs to remind itself that this was a fleeting moment. We need some historical perspective and a reality check on all the calls to put someone else at the top of the Democratic ticket. Contrast the spectacle and associated fundraising spree we witnessed last night with a real televised debate such as the first one between two candidates for the White House in Chicago on September 26, 1960.

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As everyone wrings their hands about the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence, companies worldwide are moving at lightning speed to integrate sophisticated AI technology into their businesses. Less than six months ago, more than a thousand technology leaders and researchers, including industry giants such as Elon Musk, signed a letter urging a moratorium on technological advances. They said, “We’re locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy even more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or control.”

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In a new twist, though, Osnos delivers LBJ and McNamara in a digital world format for storytelling, the way podcasts do with audio. He supplements his story with a fascinating audio clip of his discussions with McNamara over the manuscript Osnos edited for the former defense secretary’s memoir. McNamara died in 2009. You can access the audio at platformbooksllc.net. The audio is a behind-the-scenes view. Readers rarely experience the crucial give and take between a writer and editor recorded in the audio clip. In crafting his narrative, Osnos relied heavily on “hundreds of pages of transcripts and tape recordings” from his extensive discussions with McNamara in the editing process.

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Silicon Valley loves to tout its expertise in disrupting legacy company business models to force technological change. The Valley’s intellectual elite don’t have much to say about what happens when their technological transformations create more harm than good. Steven Brill skillfully scrutinizes the less flattering scenario of major internet powers in his new book, The Death of Truth, and he paints an unflattering picture. The thrust of Brill’s subtitle pretty much sums it up: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World -- and What We Can Do.

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Most, if not all, of the stories NewsGuard cited for flaws, represent reports that generated controversy when they were published over the last several years. On their own, each story could be considered a flub like many that characterize standard newsroom operations. Taken together, the flawed stories paint a disturbing trend of drifting away from basic journalistic principles highly valued by journalists and editors alike.

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How much freedom do you have in reporting the news?

Wesam: ⁠⁠ I have freedom to a certain point, which means we can’t report the whole truth accurately. The freedom to report whatever we see wasn’t the case either before or during the war. As journalists, we self-sensor ourselves. Unfortunately, we have many parties that may punish any journalist that is honest and real. For me personally, since I am working for an American network, I experience trouble a lot. Many people look at me suspiciously and may harm me if I report about the whole truth.

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When you start work, what is the first thing you see everyday?

“Before leaving for work, I bid my children and wife farewell as if it were the last time, for I do not know if I will return to them or not. Upon arriving at work, I check that my colleagues are well and review the list of victims' names in case I know one of them or have lost a dear one. I also see the lines of displaced people standing every day since morning, whether to get water or bread, or in line to receive aid. The life of the displaced has turned into queues for the mere basics of living, including treatment at the hospital's gate, where there's a line to see a general doctor amidst the shortage that the city of Rafah suffers in clinics and hospitals.” – Saif Alswaitti

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The deficit in research funding has an enormous impact on the way ME/CFS is treated, or more accurately is not treated, by the medical community writ large. Physicians around the country simply lack the body of scientific knowledge needed to learn about the disease, to diagnose it and how to ease the suffering of patients until someone develops a cure.  “The reason that patients [have been] minimized for so long is because it’s very, very clear that this complex chronic illness doesn’t fit in this neat package of ‘Here’s an X-ray. You’ve got a broken tibia,’” says David Putrino, director of Mount Sinai’s center for complex chronic illness, who has been working with patients with Long Covid since early in the pandemic. “What we are finally proving, though, is that categorically. something is going wrong in the bodies of these people.” As he has gained more experience with the condition, he no longer believes a single medical trigger explains the full range of symptoms.

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The latest example of the linguistic duel came when President Biden publicly confused the leader of Egypt with the president of Mexico. Critics pounced, citing the mistake as evidence that the eighty-one year-old Biden was too old to occupy the White House for another four years. Biden’s defenders angrily responded with a “he does it, too” defense, pointing to similar verbal stumbles by Biden’s likely opponent, the seventy-seven year-old former President Donald Trump. He recently confused his Republican primary opponent Nikki Haley with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat and former Speaker of the House. Is this behavior really the way we want to experience the contest for the nation’s highest office? If so, we’re destined to descend into a giant game of gotcha journalism with snarky reporters focused on irrelevance. Let’s emphasize what the candidates have done, not what they say.

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