Ken Buck and Kay Granger (Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

Representatives Ken Buck, R-Colo., and Kay Granger, R-Texas, said yesterday that they won’t seek re-election next year.

Buck, 64, has served in the House since 2015 and attributed his decision to retire from Congress in part to his party’s reliance on former President Donald Trump’s false claims that that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I’ve decided, Andrea, I’m not going to seek re-election,” Buck said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”

He revealed his decision after Granger, the chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, also announced that she will leave Congress.

“I’m joining Kay and probably some others in the near future, but I’ve decided that it is time for me to do some other things,” Buck said. “I always have been disappointed with our inability in Congress to deal with major issues, and I’m also disappointed that the Republican Party continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen and rely on the Jan. 6 narrative and political prisoners from Jan. 6 and other things.”

He added, “If we’re going to solve difficult problems, we’ve got to deal with some very unpleasant truths or lies and make sure that we project to the public what the truth is.”

Buck, who made clear he doesn’t plan to leave the Republican Party, said the 2024 election will be “critical … both at the presidential level and in the House.”

Granger, 80, said in her statement Wednesday that she wants younger people to take up leadership positions in Washington.

“As I announce my decision to not seek re-election, I am encouraged by the next generation of leaders in my district,” she said. “It’s time for the next generation to step up and take the mantle and be a strong and fierce representative for the people.”

“Although I am not running for re-election, I plan to serve out the remainder of my term and work with our new Speaker and my colleagues to advance our conservative agenda and finish the job I was elected to do,” Granger added.

Granger represents part of Fort Worth and its western suburbs, serving in the House since 1997. She previously served as mayor of Fort Worth.

Buck’s district covers the eastern portion of Colorado, east of Denver. Both represent safe Republican districts, according to Cook Political Report.

Both lawmakers were among the House Republicans who voted to certify Joe Biden’s election in 2020, splitting from the 147 members of their conference who voted to overturn the results.

Buck was recently among eight Republicans who voted to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker. He also opposed Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in his bid for speaker. Granger was instrumental in blocking Jordan’s speaker bid as the only committee chairperson to repeatedly vote against him. She and a group of appropriators formed the core of the anti-Jordan bloc.

The Republican Party needs to come to grips with how it has handled its positions on the 2020 election.

Tony

Mousa Abu Marzouk called Russia Hamas’s “closest friend” – NurPhoto/NurPhoto

Dear Commons Community,

Hamas called Russia its “closest friend” and promised to release eight Russian hostages kidnapped by its gunmen from Israel.  As reported by The Telegraph.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas political leader, said his officials were now looking for the Russian-Israeli dual nationals in Gaza after the Kremlin handed him a list of captives.

“We are very attentive to this list and we will handle it carefully because we look at Russia as our closest friend,” he told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency. “As soon as we find them, we will release them.”

Hamas has so far only released four hostages out of more than 230 that its gunmen captured during raids into Israel on October 7. Around 1,400 people were killed in the raids.

Abu Marzouk led a Hamas delegation on Thursday to Moscow, where he praised Vladimir Putin’s “highly valued” stance on the Israel-Gaza war.

Putin has blamed the West for the war and said that Israel should drop plans to invade Gaza.

In Russia, large pro-Palestinian protests have been held in the North Caucasus, which is predominantly Muslim-populated and poorer than the rest of the country.

The focus of these protests has been Dagestan, where thousands of people have marched through the centre of Makhachkala, the capital, and Khasavyurt, a regional town, waving Palestinian flags and demanding that Israeli refugees be evicted. 

Putin and Hamas are the same birds of a feather.

Tony

President Biden signs an executive order on artificial intelligence as Vice President Harris looks on .  Copyright (AP Evan Vucci).

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden on Monday signed an ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence that seeks to balance the needs of cutting-edge technology companies with national security and consumer rights, creating an early set of guardrails that could be fortified by legislation and global agreements.  As reported by The Associated Press.

Before signing the order, Biden said AI is driving change at “warp speed” and carries tremendous potential as well as perils.

“AI is all around us,” Biden said. “To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology.”

The order is an initial step that is meant to ensure that AI is trustworthy and helpful, rather than deceptive and destructive. The order — which will likely need to be augmented by congressional action — seeks to steer how AI is developed so that companies can profit without putting public safety in jeopardy.

Using the Defense Production Act, the order requires leading AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is to create standards to ensure AI tools are safe and secure before public release.

The Commerce Department is to issue guidance to label and watermark AI-generated content to help differentiate between authentic interactions and those generated by software. The extensive order touches on matters of privacy, civil rights, consumer protections, scientific research and worker rights.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recalled Biden giving his staff a directive when formulating the order to move with urgency.

“We can’t move at a normal government pace,” Zients said the Democratic president told him. “We have to move as fast, if not faster, than the technology itself.”

In Biden’s view, the government was late to address the risks of social media and now U.S. youth are grappling with related mental health issues. AI has the positive ability to accelerate cancer research, model the impacts of climate change, boost economic output and improve government services among other benefits. But it could also warp basic notions of truth with false images, deepen racial and social inequalities and provide a tool to scammers and criminals.

With the European Union nearing final passage of a sweeping law to rein in AI harms and Congress still in the early stages of debating safeguards, the Biden administration is “stepping up to use the levers it can control,” said digital rights advocate Alexandra Reeve Givens, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology. “That’s issuing guidance and standards to shape private sector behavior and leading by example in the federal government’s own use of AI.”

The order builds on voluntary commitments already made by technology companies. It’s part of a broader strategy that administration officials say also includes congressional legislation and international diplomacy, a sign of the disruptions already caused by the introduction of new AI tools such as ChatGPT that can generate text, images and sounds.

The guidance within the order is to be implemented and fulfilled over the range of 90 days to 365 days.

Last Thursday, Biden gathered his aides in the Oval Office to review and finalize the executive order, a 30-minute meeting that stretched to 70 minutes, despite other pressing matters, including the mass shooting in Maine, the Israel-Hamas war and the selection of a new House speaker.

Biden was profoundly curious about the technology in the months of meetings that led up to drafting the order. His science advisory council focused on AI at two meetings and his Cabinet discussed it at two meetings. The president also pressed tech executives and civil society advocates about the technology’s capabilities at multiple gatherings.

“He was as impressed and alarmed as anyone,” deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed said in an interview. “He saw fake AI images of himself, of his dog. He saw how it can make bad poetry. And he’s seen and heard the incredible and terrifying technology of voice cloning, which can take three seconds of your voice and turn it into an entire fake conversation.”

The issue of AI was seemingly inescapable for Biden. At Camp David one weekend, he relaxed by watching the Tom Cruise film “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.” The film’s villain is a sentient and rogue AI known as “the Entity” that sinks a submarine and kills its crew in the movie’s opening minutes.

“If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,” said Reed, who watched the film with the president.

Governments around the world have raced to establish protections, some of them tougher than Biden’s directives. After more than two years of deliberation, the EU is putting the final touches on a comprehensive set of regulations that targets the riskiest applications with the tightest restrictions. China, a key AI rival to the U.S., has also set some rules.

This is a good gesture on the part of President Biden but it is unlikely to have a major real affect on how AI is developed.  It is difficult to control what happens in other countries.  Presently there are more than 50,000 companies around the world involved in AI development.

Tony